[mLuby]

Stand-ups can be a drag. My last stand-ups were literally 3-5 minutes, which I attribute to everyone working on long-running project where we all either knew what "Today I'll be fooing the bar" meant or knew it wasn't important to know. And we were very good about mentioning but not discussing problems during that meeting; they'd be dealt with "off-line" (so to speak).

Retrospectives can also be good when they're focused on how to improve processes (including Agile's). If it's just a venting session, that can become demoralizing, even caustic. There's also value in not having certain people in the room, so they can't get defensive or cause people to clam up.