[tannhaeuser]

That sounds ridiculously similar to people hanging on to communism/socialism: "the principles are sound, it just hasn't been implemented as intended". Except, just like communism, Scrum has never and will never be implemented "as intended" because that's contrary to our collective evolutionary gifts, and against a developer's desire to find satisfaction in good craftsmanship. A project management methodology building on utopian altruistic ideals and delusions wrt people's motives is just propaganda.

[struppi]

Maybe what's missing in my original comment... What I'm trying to say is that there is a certain kind of organization (mostly traditional / old organizations) who would have these kinds of problems with any agile method.

And there are other organizations who can make any agile method work for them.

So, it's not really Scrum's fault when it fails (at least not always). And it's not really (or not only) Scrum's achievement when it succeeds.

As a friend of mine, Samir Talwar, once said: "To be good at software development, you need an organization that's optimized for software development. Most organizations are optimized for something else."

Anyway, if you implement a process, but ignore even the very short (22 pages) guide that summarizes the process, but instead cherry-pick what you think will work well in your org, then don't blame the process when it does not work.

As I wrote in my book: "But changing Scrum so it works within your company will not make you more agile – It will make Scrum less agile!"

[Cakez0r]

I've seen it work to the benefit of everyone before (I'm a developer). It's not a pipe dream.

[tannhaeuser]

Yes I've also been in SCRUM projects that worked well; however, these projects would have worked well under any organization, because of the particular people on the project.

[Cakez0r]

Yes, when it's worked for me, the team has also been great. What I mean, though, is that scrum was an active benefit to us. The project would've gone well with or without scrum because the team was good, but scrum was helping us achieve our potential over using other approaches (that I know of).

[srtjstjsj]

That also sounds ridiculously similar to people hanging on to capitalism: "The free market is the best way to run an economy, it's just that there has never been a free market in the real world."

[ataturk]

True. Scrum is mostly propaganda. I have yet to see it work right and it's been more than 3 different jobs now. The closest was at a big corporation where they sent us all the agile training, had buy-in from management, the PMs, everyone and that was great except that high profile project eventually had PMs whose entire jobs involved evaluating burn down charts to track progress within sprints. So yeah, they actually had people who looked across all the many dev teams doing a roll-up of burn downs for management. That was totally bizarre.