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This is just commentary on blindly following a process and taking it to the extreme. Plenty of people use scrum successfully. Plenty of people also do what this person did and follow process for process sake. That’s the issue. Agile and scrum are simply a set of tools that you can use to iterate. If you cannot intelligently look across the tools in the Agile tool box and pick the ones that you really need, you ARE doing it wrong.

I mean for goodness sake, he’s complaining about planning poker and story points. I used to play planning poker with my team every other Friday for an hour. The team would talk design or whatever they needed to on Friday afternoon and we’d estimate 3-5 things in our backlog. It was a great time to teach junior devs. They would independently think about what needed to be done and then that would be validated through planning poker. It also allowed less familiar devs to learn enough to pick up new tasks in the upcoming sprint.

It’s possible to over index on this and take it way too far. That sounds like what this guy’s team is doing. Blindly following Agile processes without questioning how they best apply to your business and team is absolutely doing it wrong.