I've installed it and I felt the same as what you mentioned :)

Then I saw Goyo Vim plugin

that's exactly what I said and it's sadly not a joke :(

I've always wondered, how did it come to this? isn't having a standup every day a 'process'?

ooh yeah, the industry is dogmatic about ill thought about so called agile principles. Nobody dare to question them it baffles me.

I've been consulting for over 10 years, how come I've never encountered a useful scrum master if they do exist

Well for one, consultants are rarely brought in to working, well-functioning companies.

Also, scrum (as in the dot-org) doesn’t do a great job of teaching management how to measure the performance of their team so it’s very easy to be bad at anything for a long time and never know it if you’re also bad at management.

I find anything (including scrum) works pretty well if you send your management team out for training too, and don’t let them piss around with soft metrics.

that's exactly my reluctance to question Agile processes, because people will think I am pushing it too far.

or do it from a plank position

I can't agree with this strongly enough also with the parent comment.

I think it's the constant conflict between the 'maker schedule' and the 'manager schedule'

I firmly believe that I can be way more productive when having no standups and when I control my time rather than satisfy an ill thought about ritual, but more often than not you can't change much about it. When I can, I always do.

interesting to see this becoming part of the tools.

In 2012, I was on project were we used a physical board, and we would make a black circle for everyday on the board and once we started exceeding the initial estimate (it was done in days as opposed to complexity for some reason) we make that in red, then we started discussing the reds

it absolutely makes no difference to me to have standups, yet still we participate in them...

- To see who's working on what, I just look at the board. - To seek help when I get blocked, I send a message on Slack (or whatever) at the point that I need that help, not only at 9:30 AM - To know who's blocked on what, just tune to Slack

Given the above and if you have the team discipline to make sure that tickets reflect the state of work. Why do we need standups then?

That time can be more targeted towards a meaningful discussion, but the industry seem to be blindly just doing that without giving it much deeper thought. It baffles me.

You might not.

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

Doing standups for the sake of it is adherence to a process over the needs of you’re people.

Equally, a core principal of agile was always:

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

And I think it’s always worth considering if your truth is the same for everyone on the team. This is actually something I’d bring up in a review (assuming you have those too right?). If you all agree that notifying and handling problems in Slack is enough, that checking the board is sufficient the just do that? What is stopping you?

I would also look for actually data too back it up. How often are people blocked. How do they get unblocked. How long does that take. Etc. Gives you some insight into the reality of the situation and some ammunition to get things changed if you’re team isn’t really being agile and is just doing the corporate software eng dance.

I get it wrong every damn time. 16 years and counting.

Same! Somehow I also start confusing this with somewhat related tools like gcc. It's rare enough that I need to query these that it's all blurry in my memory again by next time. "huh I guess gcc was that goofy one with just one dash.." Nope.