This is an article I wrote for LinkedIn in September 2025, published here for posterity.
Having worked in many teams that practice some variant of Scrum, one thing that irks me is its fondness for daily, weekly or sprint’ly rituals. Necessary disclaimer: the number of teams that actually do Scrum “by the book” seems to be quite small. Every organization has its own take on it, so what I’m observing might not apply everywhere. However, what I’m really annoyed about is not Scrum itself, but rather work that is slowed down by a self-imposed schedule.
Let’s take the nearly ubiquitous daily standup: by the book, the team should plan the day’s work, identify any impediments and adjust the sprint backlog. Why plan for just one day when the immediate goal is always to tackle the highest-priority item in the backlog? And if you have impediments, or the backlog needs changing, why would you wait for a certain point in the day to do that? Simply do it when the need arises.
If, as a developer, I had my daily standup at 08:00, and I have an impediment that I need help with at 08:30 – am I going to wait for the next standup to raise it with the team, merrily twiddling my thumbs until then, or am I going to ping the team Slack channel right away? Obviously, it’s the latter. As for positive reporting, if I have a status update, I’m not going to wait for the standup, either – I’ll update the task right away, and the PM can see the current status at any time using the project dashboard.
Is it just me, or doesn’t it feel like these rituals where invented for a world where tools that are now considered basic necessities (like Jira, Slack or their many alternatives) didn’t yet exist, and so the only way for the team to communicate was face-to-face?
The sprint retrospective is another ritual that makes no sense to me. If I have feedback on what the team is doing, why would I wait to raise it? Especially if there is a noteworthy event early in the iteration, why would I wait to discuss it until later, when it’s no longer fresh in memory? Worse, sprint retros tend to include exercises like “team health checks” which are nearly useless for learning how your colleagues are actually feeling.
The only grounded argument I’ve heard for these rituals is that many engineers don’t have the discipline to do this work unless there’s a calendar item for it. As an engineer myself, I find this slightly demeaning, and I think it is an issue that would be resolved by better leadership. If you are part a team that is still doing time-bound rituals – what’s stopping you from going on-demand?