[phamilton]

I always try to differentiate between Agile and agile. Agile (proper noun) is the overly defined practice of scrums and points and backlog grooming etc. agile is the practice of continuous iteration at all levels. Agile is a great starting point, but if you aren't challenging the prescribed format and iterating on your process itself then you are missing the point of agile.

We have found, for instance, that the 3 questions of standup are pretty useless. They make each person feel like they are justifying their existence at the company. By dropping those questions and framing it in terms of a deliverable we found the meetings to be far more productive and better for morale.

We've decided to give ourselves 1 day into the sprint to better guage progress so we can define achievable sprint deliverables, as we don't often know enough information during sprint planning.

Each of these is set up as an experiment, designed to solve an identified problem with our workflow. And the results are great.