[ebiester]

Who are these people excited about scrum? Most of the scrum masters I know dislike it and would rather build ad-hoc from the agile toolbox. Scrum is popular because it's an easy-to-implement general process that enough people know.

Scrum is the duplo block of agile. That said, it doesn't have to be that heavy. A retrospective every other week, A sprint review every other week, a sprint planning every other week, and 15 minutes a day for standup.

So that's a half day block every other week and 15 minutes a day otherwise. It doesn't even need to be a half day block - our sprint plannings usually end up being 15 minutes because we work on refining tickets through the week.

My teams have 3-4 hours of standing meetings a week. We try to group them as much as possible to avoid dumb blocks of time. The vast majority of that time is going through the work together.

The vast majority of our meetings are making sure we are building the right thing. Reviewing the specification for gaps happens with development. You could say that that could be done asynchronously, and it does. But I think so much of the issue here is that people add more.