We do a very loose agile process and everyone seems to like it. Basically, we have a standup every morning. Each team member has up to 1 minute to list (in very brief form) what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today.
It identifies if anyone will be stepping on anyone else's toes, or if anyone knows of something similar and can point you to it, and it lets the project manager know if anyone is working on something that can be traded for a higher priority task that just came up.
Most of the time, you work on what you say you're going to work on. Sometimes, the project manager will call you after standup to get more detail and/or adjust your priority to a different task.
This standup is the only formal meeting the developers go to, other than the odd department/company wide meeting. The project manager goes to all of the other meetings.
We are the most productive team in the company. I think the autonomy and the lack of formal meetings are the real magic. We're fully remote and talk to each other plenty throughout the day in an adhoc way, sometimes for fun and sometimes for technical discussions, problem solving, brainstorming, sanity checks (technical and personal), etc.
"what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today" is not something you can read off people's commits
"I was figuring out how to add a doohickey that widgets foobar" is not a commit, but during the daily someone else might remember that there already is something that can widget foobars. Or they might know that widgeting foobars was tried before and it failed because X and Y.
Then they won't start debugging that during the daily, but will point it out and get in touch afterwards along with others that might care. Either on a $TEXTUAL_MESSAGING_APP thread or $VIDEO_CALL_SERVICE call.
To my experience 10% of software developers think 7 am is morning, 60% something between 9 and 10. 30% not before 11 or 12. The first and the last group tend to be the most productive ones.
Forcing all of them to meet at 10 or even 9 is the best way to kill motivation and foster cynicism about useless meetings and processes.
Each person is limited to 1 minute, and most people only use about 10-20 seconds. So, the meetings are usually done in less time than it takes to go to the bathroom. I think everyone sees the value in calibrating our trajectory for a few minutes every day -- it often saves more time than it consumes.
It identifies if anyone will be stepping on anyone else's toes, or if anyone knows of something similar and can point you to it, and it lets the project manager know if anyone is working on something that can be traded for a higher priority task that just came up.
Most of the time, you work on what you say you're going to work on. Sometimes, the project manager will call you after standup to get more detail and/or adjust your priority to a different task.
This standup is the only formal meeting the developers go to, other than the odd department/company wide meeting. The project manager goes to all of the other meetings.
We are the most productive team in the company. I think the autonomy and the lack of formal meetings are the real magic. We're fully remote and talk to each other plenty throughout the day in an adhoc way, sometimes for fun and sometimes for technical discussions, problem solving, brainstorming, sanity checks (technical and personal), etc.