It's a minimum trust technique. It assumes people can't talk to each other. Standups force people to communicate. Retros force teams to communicate. Demos are t

It's a minimum trust technique. It assumes people can't talk to each other. Standups force people to communicate. Retros force teams to communicate. Demos are there to force people to prove that it's done. The fix is... just trust? You can do standups async, in text. Or better still, expect devs to move tickets accordingly. We moved to monthly retros. They're a good fighting ground - people will argue about how we do deployment, QA, etc. We often argue on scrum and processes too. These are useful to do frequently early on and then reduce later. Sometimes we use them when something is slipping. You can have demos just to showcase new features, without having to demo the API or do it live. Live wastes a lot of time because things suddenly don't work or people show uninteresting parts like loading or navigating all the way from the home screen.