[michaelt]

  IF teams are using Agile like that there doing it 
  wrong. It's meant to be recipe for collaborative, 
  relaxed, friendly environment.

I'm at a place where (IMHO) scrum works reasonably well. But some of the scrum language I hear people using kind of invites misunderstandings.

For example, "sprint" evokes runners running 100m at a pace they can't sustain for minutes, let alone weeks or months. And "committing to stories for this sprint" implies it's some sort of failure or emergency if the target is missed - when in truth nobody should be skimping on testing or staying late to get things done.

[nissimk]

Yeah, I feel like the language is one of the worst things. A "scrum" is a bunch of sweaty men moving down a field in a pile. The idea of that makes me want to get a different job. I'm attracted to programming because I love sitting in chairs, not engaging in violent pile ups.

I agree with what you said about "sprint," as that is the second worst word in the canon.

And user stories is trying to change the term "feature" so that developers will be more user oriented in their thinking, but the term "story" is disturbing.

[nissimk]

I forgot the other one: "epic." I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but it really disturbs me. It's just too serious sounding, like it's presumptuous to declare any component of your program as "epic" before it is done. I can think of very few software systems or components that I would refer to as epic.

Are you writing the story of the flood? Is it the oddysey, the iliad, the history of your people? No, it's just some crappy new feature that's going to take your team a few months to complete. That is totally not epic.