>Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.

Your messaging tool is not good enough to communicate urgency? You cannot send a message and say "this is urgent" and have somebody read it and respond in a timely manner? You would have better luck waiting until the next standup meeting?

>Nobody is going to spend their day checking what other people are doing on Jira

Your primary work tracking tool is not good enough to allow people to see who is working on what, and what the status of that work is? You can't get an overview of what is being worked on? You can't check on a specific issue to see how far along it is?

Here's how it works when you use your tools:

1. You have an urgent issue. You message the involved parties. Your message should communicate the urgency of the issue. They read it and respond / take action within an appropriate amount of time.

2. You want to know what your team is working on. You look at your issue tracker to see what everyone is working on. If you are curious about the status of any work in particular, you look at the details for that work. If there is insufficient information about its progress, you send the assignee a message (see #1).

In my experience most people don’t regularly post summaries of their progress on their ticket. Even getting certain people to update their ticket descriptions at all (to add test instructions or to reflect that they decided to do something other than originally described) usually requires reminders.

This may depend on team culture but in my experience a lot of people just aren’t written communicators.

I don't like the sentiment that developers doing things out of their comfort zone (like using JIRA) is unreasonable. Just get over it and be a professional.

That said, it's on others to motivate the use of such tools. It's easier to get buy-in when everyone understands the value.

A five minute meeting is not five minutes out of your day. Any scheduled interruption takes at least thirty minutes, probably more like sixty, out of productive time, as a flat cost, over and above the actual time of the meeting. It's all the time that you don't start biting into something worth doing because you look at the clock, and say "Oh fuck, I've got this fucking standup meeting in 20 minutes - I can't even get started on this before that rolls around and interrupts me." And it it all the time afterwards where you have had a bunch of shit laid in your lap that you have to spend some time following up on and frigging around with before you can get back to the work you already had planned to do.

Count the whole overhead time, from the moment people stop working normally waiting for the meeting, till the moment people come back to their seats, add up the extra coffee pause that people take afterwards that people would not usually take.

You are looking on average, at easily 15 to 20 minutes per person minimum a day, probably more.

It's not just the time itself though, it's the interruption that prevents you from starting longer tasks effectively.

Can't really account for that, work is not only about summing up minutes on a time tracking tool. There is rythm, there is acceleration, there is a productive state and there is deceleration.

Standups disrupt all that without any real benefit, other than serving as a daily reminder that you better hurry up with what you are doing - which most people don't need.

This is obviously stressful, and psychologically pressures you to try to finish the task ASAP the day before, so that you can come up to the meeting and just say its done.

Which is the real actual benefit of the standup, and why managers keep doing it, despite they are obviously not needed and in most cases a waste of time.

The standup keeps everyone on their heels and feeling like their every breath is monitored and accounted for.

Its the perception of yourself and your work from the eyes of the group that is at stake here, it's important and most people usually don't just improvise it.

Many times people have notes of what they want to say, which involves preparation, attention and energy put into it that would better be directed elsewhere.

It requires very little thought.

I've prepared for standup when I was new to a team, but it should pretty quickly get to the point where you don't need that. At least for my experiences, it's not like standup is a major factor in how teammates think of you - that comes from working together with people.

If your teams have so little trust in each other that you have to do all this preparation for a standup, then there are already much larger issues.

There's just no deep work that can be done during that time, and that's every day.

That's disruptive!

> Standups are in my experience much more effective at signalling blocking issues than slack.

If you are using Slack, you have already lost the battle for productivity.

> If a couple of minutes per day kills your velocity, as the article claims, I wonder what else you're doing during the rest of the day.

Literally any interruption destroys your focus. A pending appointment destroys your focus. If you use Slack or E-Mail notifications, people never even attain focus, so in that sense it's not a loss.

> And even then I'd guess it's useful to have a quick refresher about what you're working on.

To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on. If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work.

Daily standups pre-suppose that there's always stuff to communicate and that everyone is always involved, but only once a day and only briefly. This is complete nonsense. You need to be able to adapt to the situation. You need a meeting? Have a meeting with whoever is concerned. Have a follow-up meeting. Take your time and focus on the issue, then nobody will even feel like time is being wasted.

> "To a first approximation, nobody cares what you're working on. Nobody should care what you're working on."

I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on. Otherwise why are we even a team?

If you're not in a team, obviously things are different.

> "If your developers need to constantly communicate with each other, something is likely very wrong with the way you split up your work."

It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.

It's an argument for having meetings when you need them, with whoever you need them with, with no particular schedule or routine attached.

> I care quite a lot what the people in my team are working on.

Do you really? Or do you just want to signal that?

> Otherwise why are we even a team?

You are on a team because that's the unit of organization above the individual.

> It's the opposite: if developers are not communicating, they're probably not cooperating with each other, which means something is very wrong.

If developers need to cooperate, you have a problem that you should avoid at great cost. Of course, sometimes cooperation is unavoidable, but it's not a good thing in and of itself. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Aim to split up your work to require minimal cooperation. This may sound like unconventional advice, but anyone with enough experience managing developers will likely agree.

Phone calls and texts? Don't let your developers do them.

> To single out 'standup' as a particularly disruptive interruption may be exaggeration.

It isn't an exaggeration, because a standup is also a pending appointment and a mini-presentation. A lot of developer types actually get stressed out about this, no matter how small.

Similar thing with responding to an e-mail. It's insane how much time some people spend on just a one line reply.

Just minimize these things, don't make them part of your routine for routine's sake.