> It's not a "no true Scotsman" (scrumsman :)) if the counterexample is in fact not a Scotsman.
Every bad Scrum/Agile situation I've been in has orchestrated by people who were convinced they were doing it "the right way"
Every defense I've read has been from other people who weren't there who insist that it must be "the wrong way".
If you define the "right way" such that it can only be good, then you conveniently dismiss all of the negative criticisms at once. Yet in the real world, there appear to be a lot of us stuck in companies who think they're doing it by the book but it's still not working out.
I always wonder if they have retrospectives in those situations. And if so, what they actually do there.
In my opinion, retrospectives give the power to the team to improve their own process. Without self-organizing teams, you have no agile. So without retrospectives, you have no agile. So I always wonder if and what they do during these retrospectives.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you have the same organization, same people, but a different methodology or perhaps no methodoligy at all. Would things get significantly better?
It became really difficult to push back on or change anything because the Program Managers would band together and brandish their Scrum certifications, Scrum books, Scrum podcasts, and other credentials to show that we couldn't argue with them. Unfortunately, it worked with management.
Wipe all of that away and let all of us work together toward a methodology that worked for everyone without Product Managers playing the Scrum card at every disagreement and I have no doubt it would have been better.
In fact, I have some proof: There were a few pockets of small teams that got to operate outside of the Scrum madness either because their tasks were thought to be too small or temporary, or because they existed in islands of the org chart that were free from the reaches of the Scrum people. These small teams ran circles around everyone else, but that would come grinding to a halt as soon as their projects got assimilated into the Scrum catastrophe.
Every bad Scrum/Agile situation I've been in has orchestrated by people who were convinced they were doing it "the right way"
Every defense I've read has been from other people who weren't there who insist that it must be "the wrong way".
If you define the "right way" such that it can only be good, then you conveniently dismiss all of the negative criticisms at once. Yet in the real world, there appear to be a lot of us stuck in companies who think they're doing it by the book but it's still not working out.