I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it’s comments.

We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.

How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don’t even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D

I’ve never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I’ll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:

• Start doing X
• Keep doing X
• Stop doing X

Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.

e.g. “The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows”

Quoting from some of the comments

Its literally hand holding and baby sitting.

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak.

This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like “JoBob I’ll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig” or “After standup I’d like to talk to the team about XYZ”. We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says “I couldn’t figure out how to schoop the woop, so I’m still working on that.” but again our scrum master will say “Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don’t we chat it out after stand up”.

I hate that paragraph but I can’t find a good place to break it up, sorry.

Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:

• Your scrum master is fucking terrible at their job
• Your team actually does behave like a group of toddlers
• Your manager is actually a micromanager and this is just another micromanaging tool to them
• You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.

First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.

Second: There’s such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it’s a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to “type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit”.

Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren’t just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says “eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that”, we just suck it up and do it.

This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it’s crazy to me how ridiculous y’all make the process.

edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you’ll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that’s almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it’s our own fault when it happens to us.