Welcome to agile, where rules are made up and points don’t matter.
Jira is agile: do you use Jira and Confluence and consider this one of the main reasons contributing to your agility? Congratulations, you are part of the problem.
Boring Backlog: fixed really hard bug? Implemented complex algorithm or cut processing time from 10 hours to 22 seconds? It doesn’t matter, just pick another thing from backlog. Scrum/backlog promotes code monkeys where good effort isn’t rewarded. Personal efforts don’t matter.
Story points implementation: as long as story is implemented, quality or tech-debt doesn’t matter.
Change format of your standup to make people pay attention who is talking.
A person starts daily standup, it usually is the scrum master or team leader. They pass the ball and another person who starts talking. You count on people to volunteer and start talking what they are working on. It creates a blocking queue, it’s easy to be distracted and stop paying attention to what’s going on.
Nominate next person You can simply make the daily standup more interactive between team members, but having one team member nominate another team member after they are finished with their update.
It is often misunderstood what purpose standup questions serve. Most likely you’re familiar with the following questions:
What did you do yesterday? What are you planning to do today? Do you have any blockers? These questions make you answer what you are doing, they are misaligned with purpose of “the standup questions”, tracking progress and delivering product value.
In Scrum we do “Sprint Planning” where a team specifies a goal for the upcoming sprint, plans work and commits to deliver it.
Every now and then teams get work they don’t want to do for whatever reason:
It would be wiser to pay off tech debt before starting the new work Another tech-stack is more suited for the work, but pipeline doesn’t support the tech yet There isn’t much dev-work, but turns out regression testing is massive and one (of three) tester is on holiday and second called in sick Wild card idea A team gets 1 or 2 wild cards per year.