Provided only work that's in the issue tracker is worked on (thus avoiding work being done more than once by different people), I've never found 2. useful. Tha

Provided only work that's in the issue tracker is worked on (thus avoiding work being done more than once by different people), I've never found 2. useful. That is, the information has never been actionable for me, so it really doesn't matter what people did. People SHOULD flag stuff they encountered that others should know about, but to me that's part of the 3. "what you need/can help on" category (essentially "anything you want to flag?" be it gotchas, blockers, offers of help etc) Even 1. I find usually not useful, provided you do regular planning meetings (I like them to be weekly personally) where people are roughly assigned to areas and then just work off the backlog, although it can vary I suppose. I buy into the peopleware model personally: status meetings are a distraction, other meetings need an agenda (with a clearly defined "end point") and be time boxed. Aligning people and sharing knowledge should be accomplished through informal "coffee morning" conference-breaks-hallway-conversation style events. Ideally an hour set aside once a week, purely for this. That largely covers the cases of people overhearing what you're doing and saying they can help. In my experience, my team works so closely anyway that the standups don't add much, if anything, and the people who could benefit are not at the meeting (other teams basically). I've tried text updates in slack and that had the great side effect that other teams could see them and offer advice or help, but the downside is they're boring and people often don't read them. Informal coffee morning chats largely solve that in my opinion. Besides peoplewares suggestions on meetings, I also really like the GROWS Method model of agile.