If your SM cancels the restrospective, then you've got a VERY BAD Scrum Master... if there's one and only one ceremony any Scum Master should value, it's that one...

while I agree with you, and indeed it's specified as such in the Scrum guide, it would basically mean we only hire people with a developer profile then... I wouldn't want a tester to touch the code base too much if workload was the other way around. I can totally relate to the bottleneck effect, but the only way I ever was able to really solve it was to change a bit the composition of the team... I think testing requires a different skillset than development, while some overlap is always suitable, but not always reachable.

When confronted with questions about cancelling ceremonies (and certainly the daily stand-up) , I always turn the reasoning around : "Why do you want to cancel it? Because it would be useless. OK, then instead of cancelling it, what can we do to make it useful?"

How well are the stories refined before you ask for estimation? The main issue might not be poker planning, but simply that you're asking devs to estimate un-ready stories...

Well except for legal stuff (and even there, there are exceptions) or life-saving matters, any deadline is basically virtual anyway, or at least as hard as you want it to be. I've seen teams working hard to finish a sprint, being able to demo what they'd said they would demo, even though it is just an internal deadline. And I've seen teams which couldn't care less about how hard a deadline was...

My main concern with SAFe was that as soon as you start "planning" 6 sprints in advance, you're already turning much less agile...

@Venture2099 > Well actually many people already wrote about this: "How to motivate high performers" returns close to 2M responses on google. Some might also argue that the team manager should motivate team members, not the PM. I really think this is a typical question for the workplace, admitting it's acceptable at all for SE as it seems quite opiniated...

@MikeHofer I agree with you, something might be wrong. But sometimes that's just a reality. I've been in situation where the work schedule of the main stakeholders make it impossible for them to attend a review on a Friday, sometimes even both Thursday and Friday (or you would only get half the attendees)...so, well, you end up doing it on the first Monday of the succeeding sprint, as wrong it may be... (still better than not doing it or doing it without the major stakeholders so with very poor output)

Well if they don't want a generic answer, they probably shouldn't ask generic questions... Anyway I think this question would probably be more suited for The workplace