That’s been my experience every time I’ve worked on a team that does scrum. I find the standup is largely useless because you’re not supposed to go into details, but you kind of have to in order to explain what you’re doing. So naturally people give longer updates and the meeting drags on.

I find it’s much more productive to just meet weekly to checkpoint to see where everyone is at and decide on what tasks you want to get done this week. Then just let people organize on their own as the need arises.

I also find that scrum encourages short term thinking. Some tasks need planning and coordination, other times you start working on a task and realize that some other code needs refactoring to accommodate it.

When you have the mindset that you’re only thinking of getting the scrum card finished, you end up just hacking your way around underlying issues instead of fixing them. And the whole project just turns into a ball of mud where stuff just accretes without any vision for what the bigger picture should look like.