I reject most of the agile rituals, including daily check-ins and weekly or two week sprints.

If I personally have to check with someone, each day, to get good work from them, then my preference is to fire that person and hire someone else who I can trust. If I need to check in with a person every day, then I'm micro-managing this person, and I have to wonder why they need to be micro-managed.

This is different from me being available, every day, to help them, when they need some specific help. If they are being blocked by something, they should feel free to reach out to me and ask for my help. But a daily standup assumes that they won't ask for my help when they need it, and therefore I need to force a moment of conversation each day. Again, it is easier to fire such people and hire someone else who I can trust. I'm working in the USA where it is easy to fire people. If I was working in Europe, where it can be difficult to fire someone, then I would instead seek to get people traded away from my team, and I'd see if there were others in the organization that I could get to move to my team.

With senior level software developers I find it is often enough to meet with them on Monday and ask "What will you accomplish this week?" and then chat with them as needed during the week, and then on Friday check in with them and ask "What did you accomplish this week?" If they didn't accomplish what they thought they would during the week, then we can talk about why. With junior level software developers, I usually have to check in with them more often, which is fine. Usually, with each person, I figure out what is the ideal level of support that is needed. Every human being is a unique individual with unique needs, which is why the daily standup is a bad idea. It's important to figure out who is working for you and tailor your support to the needs of that individual.

Direct, honest communication cuts down on the need for rituals and ceremonies such as a daily standup meeting, or grouping work in two week batches.

Often, when I speak to managers of tech teams, they say the main point of two week sprints is to offer transparency to the leadership above them about what progress can be made during those two week sprints. But again, direct, honest communication with the top leadership typically does a better job of explaining what to expect, as well as to explain why something is delayed, if something is delayed.

To the extent that two week sprints serve a mostly political goal, I'd rather address the politics directly. I expect people below to reach out directly when they have something to say, and I do the same to the folks above me.

None of this precludes tracking how much work is being done every week, or every two weeks. If the work is being tracked in a tool such as Jira, it is still possible to add up the number of points that are being done each week. Nothing that I say here suggests that I'm against gathering metrics and trying to improve those metrics. But many of the rituals that are currently advocated for Agile development processes waste time on meetings that could more easily be worked out informally in a series of quick one-on-one conversations -- a style that is actually agile, rather than burdensome and officially Agile.

In general, meetings that waste time should be reduced to a minimum. Conversations that have specific purposes should be encouraged. Large group meetings should be reduced, and one on one meetings should be favored. This style has worked well me over the last 20 years that I've been doing this. As to the details, and nuances, of getting the most from one on one conversations, I develop this theme in my book "One on one meetings are underrated, group meetings waste time."