[wild_egg]

> It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong".

Scrum is a victim of semantic drift. The vast majority of people "doing scrum" have never read the guide and are just doing things that other people have told them is Scrum.

It's not Scrum's fault that people have hijacked its name for something completely different. It happens often.

What people call Scrum isn't really Scrum. What people call REST isn't really REST. What people call DevOps isn't really DevOps.

People using the wrong word for something doesn't mean the original definition of the word is invalid.

It's fairly different from the Communism situation in that people discussing Communism are generally talking about the same concepts and the debate is whether or not they're feasible. With the other terms I used above, people are using the same words to talk about completely different concepts with different definitions.

[knallfrosch]

> It's not Scrum's fault that people have hijacked its name for something completely different. It happens often.

Scrum contains so many pitfalls that it's inevitable to get it wrong. Oh, the Sprint Review is NOT a report to management? Please do tell me where this then happens instead. If a manager can attend a 1 hour meeting to summarize the 2-3 weeks that the sprint was about, it will be abused.

[jjav]

> People using the wrong word for something doesn't mean the original definition of the word is invalid.

It doesn't make the original definition invalid, but words mean what society uses them to mean, which changes over time.

So agile & scrum do in fact today mean constant status meetings, treating professional developers as mindless cogs and keep everyone in line with a constant stream of tickets chosen by someone else.

Perhaps it's not what it meant in some idealistic manifesto lost to history, but it is what it means to developers employed in the industry today.

[rerdavies]

Scrum (or agile) done wrong is a unimaginable nightmare (I actually do have first-hand experience with that). But, overwhelmingly, my experience with scrum has been nothing but sweetness and light. When it is done right, all the stress melts away. Seriously. Just an absolute joy.

Are those who have toxic experiences with scrum actually a majority, or are they just a vocal minority? I'm curious if there's any data on that.

[JohnFen]

> Scrum (or agile) done wrong is a unimaginable nightmare

I agree. The issue is that I have literally never seen it done "right". It doesn't practically matter what agile is theoretically supposed to be, it matters what it actually is.

[RHSeeger]

> People using the wrong word for something doesn't mean the original definition of the word is invalid.

Yeah, it's literally the worse thing you can do. I mean, not for the original definition of literally, but the new definition of literally, which is literally not literally, and actually literally in the dictionary with the definition of "not literally".

Just saying, at some point, the definition everyone uses becomes _the_ definition. And yes, I'm not a fan either.