[azangru]

> Scrum practitioners/coaches always seemed to have this idea that if Scrum wasnt working then you werent doing it properly.

And if people mean different things by the word scrum, it is rather hard to tell whether they are doing it properly :-)

Scrum is pretty difficult to do properly (the famous "easy to understand, but difficult to master" formula; although I would argue that it isn't that easy to understand either, at least not something that someone unfamiliar with it can understand in a day or two). It requires certain changes within the organization, which few organizations are willing to adopt.

[pydry]

I find this to be a problem with agile, but not so much with Scrum. It's quite proscriptive and there is a set of quite specific rules and processes you can follow.

[azangru]

> I find this to be a problem with agile, but not so much with Scrum.

I am seeing problems left and right. Mostly because people often copy the activities (they would often even call them rituals or ceremonies, as if to make it even more obvious that they are treating them as mysterious quasi-religious practices) without understanding what they are intended to achieve.

For example:

    - Lots of daily scrums in which people go around the circle saying what they did yesterday and what they are going to do today. No sense of a common sprint goal, and no indication of collaboration in reaching it.
    - Lots of sprint reviews that are just demos
    - Lots of sprints without goals, that are just timeboxes to finish a certain number of tickets/stories
    - Lots of teams that remain hierarchical, and instead of a real product owner have some kind of a middle manager (who might also assume scrum master responsibility, because he is manager)
    - Lots of teams focusing on story points, velocity, and estimation
    - Lots of teams that don't adapt previously formed plans to the emerging reality 

And so on, and so forth.

[pydry]

>Lots of daily scrums in which people go around the circle saying what they did yesterday and what they are going to do today. No sense of a common sprint goal, and no indication of collaboration in reaching it.

I remember reading the scrum manual but I don't remember it saying anything about it being necessary to show esprit to corps and a "collaborative spirit" during standup.

It did say how to conduct a standup ceremony though...

>Lots of teams focusing on story points, velocity, and estimation

Well, they did make these things a part of scrum.