I'm dubious of DSM's merits. I've asked people (in small team nonetheless) less than one hour after a DSM what others have done / were doing and usually they couldn't remember.

I personally think a good team leader / project manager and an issue tracker + git annotations is better.

"Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time"

And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.

"In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team."

And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?

"it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing."

Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.

> Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No. Stand-up is all about accounting for time:

* What did you do yesterday? (That's accounting for time)

* What are you working on today? (That's also accounting for time)

* What roadblocks/hurdles are you encountering (That's accounting for things that take unexpected amounts of time...ie also accounting for time)

Agile is the gonorrhea or methodologies. At best, it is a minor annoyance; at worst it really impacts your ability to get it on.

First of all, some kind of periodic status meeting is a necessary evil. Everyone hates giving status reports and justifying time. It's humiliating and time-consuming. It probably has to happen. If you don't have a scheduled, formal status reporting, you end up with impromptu status pings that are astronomically more annoying and lead people to give up on getting anything done (because there's nothing more anxiety-inducing and flow-breaking than an unreliable environment in which you can be expected to give status at any time).

The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.

Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.

Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).

Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.