[freedomben]

No dictation on length, but the length is supposed to be consistent. If you want to take a three week sprint or something instead because the feature makes sense, you mess up a whole lot of things, especially the metrics. And, let's be honest, the metrics are the biggest reason why management imposes Scrum. They want to be able to quantify everyones contribution down to hard numbers that they can then use to know how everyone is performing. If you screw up the metrics, it won't take long for someone to step in and "get your team back on track."

[ebiester]

Metrics and software process are orthogonal. Now, you can argue that consistent processes across teams is used to enable metrics, but Taylorism is going to creep up any place that has management that has been infected by it.