[gjmacd]

I came from the company that virtually invented Scrum (Easel Corp / Jeff Sutherland) -- showing my age now, I assure you -- it wasn't invented to give non-technical people the power over developers. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was created to help developers ensure that their lives could be validated in the timebox of work that was required of them. No offense, but you need to probably work in a better Scrum environment. Sounds like you haven't experienced Scrum properly.

[mempko]

Exactly. As far as I know, scrum doesn't have managers. Just don't tell that to the managers ;-)

[gjmacd]

as soon as he went all "the managers", i knew he'd been poorly educated around Scrum. The funny think about Scrum is that upper management doesn't like it. They'd rather operate in a waterfall approach because they can blow up roadmaps and not have any trace of the offense. With Scrum, you can do the "Ok, but that will require you remove X points from this Sprint and replace that work." Which has a check and balance on that sort of problem when someone wants something unplanned or changes scope on things. Scrum's s a tool to ensure that you have some level of "management" for the management but also it demonstrates how developers aren't always magicians. That's what people who don't like Agile/Scrum don't quite get.