First of all, I hear your frustration. I've been a part of way too many teams that just do things for the sake of doing them. It sucks when it seems like no one

First of all, I hear your frustration. I've been a part of way too many teams that just do things for the sake of doing them. It sucks when it seems like no one else cares or will even acknowledge that it's a waste of time. I'm not trying to push any particular part of scrum on anyone. My point was that I think teams should look to agile as a bunch of suggestions and should change or remove things as they see fit. If it's not working, scrap it. If retros assume your team works in one way, and your team doesn't work that way, change how your team does retros or don't do them. Hell, at one company I worked at that was going through a particularly rough transition, we moved our "retros" to 3pm on Friday, brought beers, and by the 15 minute mark it was usually just a bitch-fest about everything that was going wrong at the company. They weren't the most productive retros ever, but it was what the team needed at that time. > Example for retros. They solve agreeableness and bottling things up, in theory. In practice, a lot of people stay agreeable and continue to bottle things up. I disagree. From what I've seen, people are a lot more willing to speak up if they know they're not the only one feeling that way. It's easier to "yes and" someone else's complaint that speak up on your own. I just ran our retro today, where one of the more quiet members only had positive things to say until one of the other members of the team mentioned how they were having trouble getting reviews on PRs in a timely manner. Once that was out there the quiet team member was happy to hop in and share her issues around the same thing, but I doubt that would have happened if someone else hadn't "popped the cork". > Maybe they try a few times, only to notice what they say doesn't really affect the future, leading to more frustration than just not saying anything. This sounds like the real root of your problems. If nothing is coming from your retros, I can see why you would be frustrated (I would be too). Our retros end with us going over the list of action items and assigning owners. Our next retro then starts with us going over that same list and seeing who got what done. For my current team that works really well and we've actually had some pretty great things come out of our retros because of it. I'm not trying to push that on you, but just giving an example of what works for us. I hope I don't come off as offensive, but it really sounds to me like your team is pretty dysfunctional. I'm not sure there's really any process to get around that. Saying retros are useless when no one on your team cares is kind of like saying power steering is useless when your car is on fire.