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Am I the only one who feels like morning scrum meetings are a complete waste of time? At least in the way that my team does them. It's 30 minutes of "I did this thing yesterday, and I will continue to do that same thing today." All of this information can be sent in an email, but we insist on meeting every morning to say the same exact things.

For the past 3 weeks, the majority of the team has said the same exact things during scrum: "I continued to work on this big feature yesterday. Thank you." Like how does a detailed retelling of what this person did yesterday pertain to the rest of the team? It's just meeting for the sake of meeting, and talking for the sake of talking.

If you have this little technical issue that only pertains to work that this single person is doing, then meet with that person separately and discuss it. There's no reason to make everybody else sit and listen to information that will never be useful to them.

And most of the time, this scrum stems into spontaneous unplanned longer meetings afterwards. So suddenly this "quick" 30 minute scrum turns in 2-hours of meetings and a morning wasted on information that could've easily been discussed over email instead

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  • 2
    at some moment in time, this eventually have to happen to everyone, apparently :D
    the infamous meeting loop
  • 3
    I get the frustration, but at least for us, a boring scrum is a good scrum. I'm OK with the daily 'Did that yesterday, doing this today, no roadblocks ...' and the occasional two hour follow up meeting. After years of working on projects with vague requirements, almost no interaction between mangers/devs/users (very 'waterfall') and numerous failures (which results in a lot of distrust between teams), the 'status update' emails don't/didn't cut it.

    Ever since we adopted a more Agile development life cycle, every single project (yes, every one) has been a success.

    No grand deployment dates, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, just a slow & steady release cycle with one day, no more deployments.

    I don't think our users could go back to waterfall even if we wanted to.
  • 1
    I know how you feel. We've started the same at my work. "Yesterday I did that, today I'm gonna do this" and pass the rubber duck to next person. But most of the devs were dissatisfied with it so our scrum master decided to experiment with it and after few different approaches we've ended up with meetings that are focused on what's on our borad on jira. We are showing it on a projector and going through all tasks from top to bottom (they are sorted by priority) and summarize its progress.

    What's its status? How is progress? Is any help needed and if so who can help you with that? etc.

    If somebody has some problem or concern can mention it here.

    Daily become faster and more informative.

    I'd suggest to talk about it with your coworkers and scrum master, explain what you don't like about it and what can you do to improve it. Make a separate meeting about how can you improve meetings.
  • 2
    As someone who receives a daily email of "what we did yesterday, what we are doing today, and what we need to do soon" I don't read it.

    That's why you have the scrum
  • 0
    @seraphimsystems yup, everyone on my team is like you. I send a bunch of status updates to my friends (kind of not a company just a startup kinda thing) .

    They completely ignore it! I honestly don't care about reporting.. hell it's just a status update for myself tbh.
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