The points assignment wasn't useless; it was just for tracking relative difficulty. Some tasks were trivial, only taking a couple of hours, so they got a "1",

The points assignment wasn't useless; it was just for tracking relative difficulty. Some tasks were trivial, only taking a couple of hours, so they got a "1", while other tasks were projected to take 2 weeks, so those got an "13". The idea was to pick a bunch of tasks that were basically do-able within the 2-week sprint, and ignore the rest, so while 1 dev might take on a 13-point task and nothing else, another dev might take a bunch of 1s and 5s. And yes, the priority had to be factored in too, which was influenced by both customer requests and dev input (i.e., "this is super easy and I can have it done today" or "this is difficult and will take a month"). >And as for talking as a team, we can just do it without any other excuse than discussing the project and the methodologies. You can, but no one actually does it in practice. Individual team members might chat together from time to time, but putting everyone in one room together forces them to interact with all their other team members and talk about real work-related stuff, instead of just hanging out with their one buddy and talking about something irrelevant.