If actions didn't have consequences then sprint planning would make for an excellent nap time. 💤

Then you are not doing sprint planning correctly

@ejwill do you have tips to improve?

Few questions first. How many people are on your team? Has everyone on your team had some agile training? Everyone is pointing stories and not deciding how it will be done or who will do it or how many hours it will take?

Have about 6 devs on the team (including me). Some agile training, and everyone is definitely learning some as we go along. We all have our own stories that we're supposed to come in with pre-estimated (fib. points) but that doesn't always happen. And then a lot of times we do discuss some implementation details.

So the stories are supposed to come from the product owner and they are the ones that prioritize the work. In backlog refinement you work on the stories that are not ready yet. Figure what the acceptance criteria is and as a team you point the story (points are not hours). Sprint planning is the easiest you just decide as a team what you are going to finish in your sprint

There are a lot of different ways to to get the team to point cards you will have to try several to find one that works for your team

Thanks, good advice I think. I think one of our biggest problems right now is we go off on tangents occasionally, and only a couple people are involved in those, which disengages the rest of the group and bores them.

That's where your scrum master should come in and cut off those tangents. Those are still good to have just not during agile meetings. Everything should be focused.

I love it when the answer is "that's cause you're not doing Agile right".

If your app's users can't understand it, it's your job to fix it. If Agile doesn't work, it's your job to fix it?

Agile is a hard thing to wrap your head around at first especially coming from waterfall. It does take time for teams to really see the power of agile. My team is now putting how more work in a shorter amount of time than ever before.