Many companies follow "Stand up" meetings i.e. every day your team will gather for 15 mins and each member will tell what they did. Sometimes I feel it's just an overkill and not to mention in some cases 15 min meetings extend up to an hour.
Do you think these stand up meetings are useful?
tl;dr - Useful once (maybe twice) a week, but everyday is a waste of everyones time. (number of people x 15mins).
Depends on your team structure - do you follow agile scrum with set sprints in which case they might be useful if done correctly. Doing agile kanban where everyone is a project manager, developer and tester, they are mostly useless since team members will prioritise work as it comes in.
As long as they're only 15 minutes long. In my company every single meeting, even when they say it will last only 5 or 10 minutes end up being a whole hour long if it is short, they love to add a lot of different stuff and areas for meetings. For example instead of doing short meetings for each area of the company they make everyone go to the meeting and stay there to the end.
tl;dr - it depends.
What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Do you have any blockers? Do you need help from anybody? These are the questions we answer in our stand up. It's short and sweet, usually not more than 5 mins for a team of 12 members. I find there is value there and the time commitment is minimal.
In my old team, we talked about anything and everything, from requirements to design to bugs. It would often take 30+ minutes, sometimes an hour or more. It wasted a lot of everybody's time. Don't do it that way.
I am not certain what your definition of standup is, but here an ARTICLE you might find useful. There are various flavours of agile/scrum, though, and if your definition of standup os just "short meeting" (dictionary), then perhaps your projects office do need to revise why you are having them? Would need more detail to be sure...
They add little to no value for us as developers. But they are a requirement for the business team to track our progress. I work very close to my colleagues so if I want to know what they did yesterday or what they are working on at that moment I ask.
But I get that not everyone in a company can be approachable and having these meetings can fill some gaps.
In my company every day we spend around 10 or 15 minuts to talk about waht we did yesterday and what we make today :)
Vasan Subramanian
Previous generation techie
Daily stand-ups are very useful and productive to the entire team if done the correct way.
The correct way:
The not so correct way:
If it's extending to an hour, you're surely doing it the incorrect way. Yet, I voted "No" to be truthful to the question that was asked. Stand-ups are not useful to the day-to-day life of the programmer, who typically is impatient, wants to back to his or her terminal and fix that pesky bug or work on that incredible idea.
But they are very useful for the team as a whole, the project and the sprint, and finally the long term success of a programmer (as opposed to day-to-day life).