If you are doing Scrum, the development team should be doing something like over 2 weeks:

Daily standup: 15 mins x 10 days = 150 minutes = 2.5 hours Backlog grooming: 0.5 - 1 hour Sprint planning: 0.5 - 1 hour Retrospective: 1 hour Demo: 1 hour

So about 5.5 - 6.5 hours of meetings over 2 weeks. If you're really militant, you can probably take it down to 4 hours, but I don't think you can get much lower than that without dispensing with formal Scrum.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have 6.5 hours of meetings over 2 weeks.

Your backlog grooming is a bit to long. You should only be grooming 10-20 tasks.

I've been in standups that lasted an hour a day. That'll destroy your morale pretty damned quick.

They are doing it wrong. 8 people should not take an hour to say: What did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, is there anything blocking me?

There should not be a discussion of every point. The only discussion should be "oh let's talk about that impediment after the meeting with a smaller group of people" or "let me follow up with you after lunch".

The standup is 10-15 minutes. If it is longer, it needs to be stopped. Period. Non-negotiable.

> There should not be a discussion of every point. The only discussion should be "oh let's talk about that impediment after the meeting with a smaller group of people" or "let me follow up with you after lunch".

Guess what? Those things are still meetings. They still take up actual time that could be spent on getting shit done.

They don't, however, involve everyone. The standup does. That's key. If person A needs to talk to person B about an issue, and it's done in standup, it wastes person C, D, etc's, time, even though they don't need to be involved. Doing it with just the required people is, obviously, required anyway, and the problem a lot of people doing agile have is they end up wasting everyone's time by bringing it up during standup.

A 45 minute meeting that spawns off of a 15 minute meeting is still a total of 60 minutes of meeting time. And yes, while that 45 minutes involved fewer total people, that doesn't mean that others won't have spin-off meetings of their own.

But that 45 minute meeting had to happen anyway, apparently. It wasn't scheduled or mandated, it was decided by those two people it needed to happen. Meaning regardless of process, it was necessary. The issue is a lot of people seem to see "standup requires everyone", and "communication should happen", and conflate the two to "every meeting requires every person", which just is not the case, and then as they see all their time is taken up by pointless meetings they didn't need to attend, they blame agile. I've seen the same mistake in waterfall development shops, and people blamed the process there too, even though it's really just cultural.

Let me give you a specific example.

Persons A-H have a standup. It's 15 minutes.

Afterwards, A needs to talk to C about something, which will take 45 minutes. B needs to talk to D about something, which will take 45 minutes. F needs to talk to both A and H about something, for 45 minutes.

A talks to C, while B talks to D. Then A talks with F and H.

Total time taken (excluding the 15 minute standup) -

A - 90 minutes B,C,D,F,H - 45 minutes E,G - 0 minutes.

This is exactly what should have happened -regardless- of your process; these are meetings where only the required people are involved, no one's time is wasted.

What often ends up happening when you hear about day long status meetings and other such terribleness, is after the 15 minute standup, they go straight into discussions, with the entire team. That is -

A talks with C, with everyone still present. Then B talks with D, with everyone still present. Then A talks with F and H, with everyone still present. For a total time of 135 minutes (again, excluding the 15 minute standup). Meaning that -everyone lost 135 minutes-.

Now, if you're claiming that A never actually needed to talk to C, and B never actually needed to talk to D, and A never actually needed to talk with F and H, then that's an organizational problem that is, again, unrelated to agile (or waterfall, or anything else). You simply have people who insist on wasting others time, and regardless of your methodology you're going to run into that issue.

If you want to say that 2 people resolving an issue is a meeting, sure, go ahead and call it that. But I would suggest that the meeting needed to happen anyway.

Scrum doesn't imply that unneeded meetings need to be created for no purpose.

It is perfectly okay to also say during the standup "I'll follow up with you over email later" or "Let's resolve this over Slack".

So, have you ever said "Anyone going over sixty seconds will be shot" and there's that one guy - or two, or three - who nevertheless always take five minutes? Yeah, turns out you probably can't actually shoot them.

No, but you can cut them off and say "I'm sorry but we need to move on, you have 5 more seconds to finish what you're saying".

You can indeed do that. Sometimes they even stop! Not very often, though. Again, the inconvenient lack of actual bullets.

There were frequently 10-15 people in the standups. And sure, you can say "if it's longer, it needs to be stopped" but management doesn't work like that.

Let's not forget the daily leadership meetings and weekly all-hands standup. Those are a real hoot...

No, incentivizing small tasks that look good in standups over larger, less-sexy tasks kills productivity.

Only 2--4 hours? I wish.