Besides that, I hate that they took me out of rhytm of work. If a standup is at 10am, and I arrive at 9am to do dev work, there is very little I can do before being interrupted - I need at least 2-4h of interrupted time to do some good work.
For technical or non-technical teams, this is usually all that's needed. If there are any questions, they can be addressed below in a reply thread or via a call or face-to-face.
It's amazing how much of a time saver and efficiency builder that can be. It's equally amazing how many managers prefer time wasting group meetings where people essentially read written reports...
I think this is the correct way to do standups for most teams. It's asynchronous and non-intrusive, and there generally isn't any benefit from doing the standup in person anyway (aside from seeing people's faces if your team is remote).
It works very poorly in practice, in my experience.
You interrupt people 2-4 hours into their work, which is highly disruptive for those who get the most done in the morning.
Often discussions run on past many peoples' lunch time, which can make people cranky and occasionally leads to tense exchanges which might have been more amicable if people weren't hangry.
You wind up with people melding the work they did during the previous day and the current day. It gets difficult to keep track of what you did between two days' midpoints compared to what you did during a day.
And things get worse as more items are inevitably added to the standup meetings (now we need to check on tests, now we need to add a review of open tickets, now we need to involve people from other teams, etc).
In my experience, pre-lunch scrums result in heavy disruption and a bunch of people who feel like they could be doing other things to much greater effect.
In my team, we have it early in the morning, so we can overlap with India. Folks in US have rest of their day for work, whereas folks in India do the standup at the end of the day just before going home.
That's why you should do them at the end of the day as we did of my first very successful Agile project - presented at the IIIE I believe after we finished.
Though that was the full on clean room high level sponsor route, collocated with the customer.
I did that (4pm standups) for a while on a team that was just me and another guy plus our team's dev manager, qe manager, and product manager. All the managers were in HQ, my teammate and I were in separate remote offices, so it was done over Hangouts. We loved it being late and got a lot done for just two of us over the few months, but the managers didn't like it (very few times they'd all show up, and dev manager always showed up while on a bart train) and killed it (back to 10am meetings) a few weeks before the team dissolved.
I've been on 11am standups lately and they're not too bad, but it incentivizes me to either come in at 8 or come in at 10-10:30. The latter is what usually happens.
