[bmj]

I would argue that management often doesn't truly understand "Agile" beyond "software engineers should operate this way." In my organization, the engineers are willing to be disciplined with Agile practices, but product management has no interest in real planning that would achieve a manageable backlog across releases. Instead, they change release scope numerous times, and nearly every release cycle runs long because we never finish what we start--by the final iteration we are working on entirely different stories than what we groomed in iteration #1. To them, "agile" means "do what we want whenever we want it."

[shandor]

> "do what we want whenever we want it."

Isn't that quite well in accordance of Agile Manifesto's "Responding to change over following a plan"?

Sprints and backlogs and grooming, all those sound they're straight from the Scrum Book. And while I understand that for many Scrum == Agile, actually it's not.

Note that I'm not saying anything about what's the best way to do software. Only that "responding to change" sounds very much agile.

[projektfu]

This sort of thing happens all the time. The Japanese-style quality movement had many different fads (for example 5S) but most of the top denizens said that there are some basic universal facts about quality but every organization has to develop their own system that works. Consultants can help you do that but you can't follow a textbook and make a company. By contrast, the American quality movement has always been filled with charlatans and fads like "Zero Defects". Do Americans want religion and not mastery? Who knows.

I see Scrum a lot like I see Six Sigma. They take some of the processes you see from a successful team and they turn them into gospel for managing all teams. Sometimes they try to apply these processes to the rest of the company in places where they don't make sense. They create a bunch of certification levels so that they can claim you can't just learn it from a book. They make a bunch of money but leave their clients in a strange place.