We recently spent weeks doing a backlog grooming meeting every day to get work lined up, only to have our priorities completely changed and all of the work discarded.

Why would you spend weeks doing backlog grooming meetings every day? We do a single one-hour backlog grooming meeting before each sprint, to plan the work for that sprint. If you're planning out much further than that, that's not agile.

True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request.

Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.

> Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.

I don't disagree with this. However,

>True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request.

This is like saying the first test should always fail because the tested code doesn't exist. While that's a good start, it usually takes a few sprints to release anything useful; especially if you have any hardware involved. Therefore, having a number of stories in a backlog really helps, especially if you do have to re-prioritize because hardware is delayed, etc.

The backlog is not large and we don't use this meeting for prioritization.

Our team uses backlog grooming to point tasks and assign them "definitions of done". This is done to solve two problems: getting everyone on the same page as far as how the task will be done, which also speeds up diff reviews, and to determine if the task should be split up into smaller tasks.

When would you perform these tasks?

> Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.

This is not at all what we do with this meeting.

We had had our priorities completely shifted, we changed POs twice in just a few weeks, and our previous work plans were tossed out. We met daily to build up the backlog, then had our priorities changed completely again, and invalidated all of the planning.

I agree 100% that it's not Agile.

I'm so glad my team is distributed across different offices and we do our stand-ups at our desks. Having hypermobility in my knees, and most other joints, I get tired from standing still more than 2-3 minutes...

...and only have those stand for whom it's not a burden.

It seems nowadays the "standing" up has become some weird ritual that one must undergo, without questioning, as a sacrifice to the gods of "Agile".

Bizarre.

All the practices have a purpose. If they don't fit, don't do them. Figure out what works for you. Adjust, adapt. Think!

No, the planes of productivity will not come to your fauxgile wooden landing strip.

Next time someone insists on standing, I'll counter with do pushups while you're talking instead. Should shut most people up fast enough.

Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices. There's no such thing as having just half of your house on fire. If a fundamental business element like customers or leadership is missing, everything else will be bad. Waterfall and agile methods are equally damned when the something else is causing a company to under perform.

> Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices.

I was talking to the CTO of a large non-tech company and he was so excited how the whole development organization had adopted agile. Later he told me that after the conference he had to fly to a huge meeting where they plan and schedule out the next 6 months to a year of development work.

Are you sure he wasn't referring to roadmapping? You can plan what projects to take on in the next quarter or two with a product team while the engineering team remains agile in their operations.

Nope. It was a multi-day meeting where the entire development organization waterfall planned the next 6-12 months of work. This included due dates and all. For their org size, maybe that's how they have to do development, but it was nothing like any agile I've ever done.