[gedy]

We had Ken Schwaber come in to our shop early on in Scrum when we were struggling to get a new product going, and at its basics Scrum made tons of sense. Get a small group of people together to figure out how to make the highest priority items to ship to the customer (each written in a few sentences), then leave that group alone until the sprint was done. The "commitment" was on delivering the value in the few sentences, not matching mockups, specs or some never-ending chain of tasks.

It was a really simple and effective approach, but where it broke down was: there's a lot of people/roles/depts who have no idea how to work incrementally. UX "needs to work ahead", product "needs the whole backlog", Ops "have their own backlog", etc.

Scrum didn't work with everyone hawking over a few engineers - then it just becomes task tracking bullshit.