[JoshTriplett]

Having worked on a team using Scrum, I agree with this: it's pretty much the least process you can have while still fairly accurately predicting when work will get done and when any given feature will show up in the product.

But it can be done well or badly: the team I worked on rigorously adhered to the process, and only cautiously diverged from it after careful consideration. Scrum done badly will rapidly become micromanagement instead.

[wadetandy]

I feel like every time I complain about scrum and my frustrations with it to people who believe in it, the response is always "well you just don't understand scrum," or, "you're just not doing scrum correctly." If the process is really as good as it is supposed to be and espoused to be by scrum evangelists (including many of the coaches my companies have hired to help us implement it), then I wonder why it's so hard to do correctly.

I have worked with great engineering teams that have hummed along in informal processes that were similar to Kanban (though not defined as such). As soon as we were forced to switch to scrum, out productivity absolutely tanked, and we couldn't get the things we needed done because we were either in planning meetings all the time or we had to spend longer deciding whether to change our priorities mid-sprint as things would come up or lessons were learned, because that meant a lot of time and energy spent communicating up the chain why things did not get finished or the priorities changed.

[JoshTriplett]

> If the process is really as good as it is supposed to be and espoused to be by scrum evangelists (including many of the coaches my companies have hired to help us implement it), then I wonder why it's so hard to do correctly.

I'm quite skeptical of "agile coaches" and similar.

But in general, I'd suggest that it's easy to break by either swapping out or eliminating one of the defined roles, having someone unsuitable for those roles doing them (e.g. a manager or program manager serving as "scrum master", which instantly turns scrum into micromanagement), having an excessive number of mid-sprint changes (if changing a sprint's work mid-sprint happens every other sprint, something is very wrong), or not having any acceptance from the broader organization for getting work done at a regular cadence without constant "emergency interrupts".

You should not be spending any significant fraction of your time in planning meetings; those occur once a sprint at most, and the sprint-planning portion should mostly consist of quickly doublechecking priorities and grabbing the top stories by priority. The other significant effort lies in breaking down and "sizing" stories (which is the job of the development team, not the person providing requirements).

I do agree that Kanban can work as well; it just doesn't (in my opinion) have good predictive power for when work will get done. (On the other hand, some of our teams ended up switching to Kanban because Scrum doesn't work at all with a distributed team.)