planning can be useful if stories entering the queue are refined in real time and the team knows where they are going. best case, it's a ten minute "here's the

planning can be useful if stories entering the queue are refined in real time and the team knows where they are going. best case, it's a ten minute "here's the backlog; who needs work?; what are we shipping this week?" conversation...but this assumes a high-performance team of go-getters where every story is vetted well enough for anyone to pick up (that convo can be had on slack, btw, just like standups.) the problem is "scrum masters" waiting to refine/reject stories during refinement (or not refining at all), or engineers not updating their cards frequently enough, or nobody guarding the backlog and allowing anyone to dump stuff into it. when these things happen, you get three-hour-plus-long sprint planning that wastes everyone's time the other thing I absolutely hate are capital-r-Retros. retros are supposed to be the meeting that everyone looks forward to, but they often get skipped because it's an hour of people sharing platitudes because the room isn't safe enough to REALLY say what you feel. if i ran retros, they would be at a nearby pub or chill restaurant, over beverages and food, with no real structure other than "at some point we should talk about how this week went."