[WhiskeyTang]

I completely agree. I was a certified scrum master, scrum master of a team of 6 for 2 years, and was directly coached by an external (and expensive) scrum consultant. We got pretty deep into the scrum process, even going so far as to estimate and track the number of hours each task would take. After all of that, my takeaway is that thoughtful, engaging retrospectives are the only scrum "event" or process that a team should do. Want to do a stand up meeting only once a week? Go for it. You think pointing stories is a waste of time? Cool, spend that hour coding instead. But you have to regularly check in and make sure your process is actually working, and then put some effort into improving it.

Also, don't forget to retro your retros. Maybe a 2 hour meeting twice a month is a waste of time because your team is already great at providing feedback and trying new things naturally. Getting rid of the meeting might be the best thing as long as there is a viable alternative way for everyone to provide feedback and suggestions.

[pas]

how did you estimate hours? do you mean that the team estimated "story points" and it was so precise and the team was so good at meeting the per-sprint point load that it was basically a nice hour estimate? or did you estimate hours directly?