In my personal experience, sprints are mostly a waste of time. They're maybe useful when you really need regular updates about the status of a project with clea

In my personal experience, sprints are mostly a waste of time. They're maybe useful when you really need regular updates about the status of a project with clear milestones, but I think the software world (or some corners of it, anyway) are coming around to the "It's ready when it's ready" mentality rather than crunching for arbitrary deadlines. So I personally prefer something more like Kanban. I use that both professionally and personally. I also don't like points generally. To some degree you need some kind of estimate, but estimations are notoriously inaccurate, so just embrace that and stick a "days/weeks/months" label on something and call it a day (though if it is weeks or months, it should probably be broken down, but I do that on-the-fly as I arrive at those bigger tasks and develop an understanding of what's involved). I actually do find standups useful in my experience, because in my team we have a couple individual contributors working largely independently on independent components of an overall software suite. Some of them are new and so might try reinventing wheels we've already solved in other compartments. By having a dedicated time for people to just talk about what they're doing, more senior developers can catch when wheel-invention is happening and steer the more junior developers towards existing solutions. But above all, don't cargo-cult any practice. Find what works for a specific team and run with it, because different teams have different needs. That's the real essence of Agile.