Scrum is fragile, not Agile
At the company I work at, we have the following scrum anti-patterns. I wish I knew, whether we could &quot;do scrum right&quot; or just move onto something simpler (fta; priority queue)<p>* Daily standup, nobody wants to be at. We have multiple teams arrive, with roughly 20 people in a small room. Some people stand, some people sit. Sometimes the front-end team goes, sometimes the back-end team goes. Its limited to 15 minutes, so nobody says much of importance, and just parrots what is already on the Jira board.<p>* Scrum master driving process above scrum. The scrum master&#x27;s role is to make sure scrum rules are adhered to. But at this company, any deviation from scrum itself poses a threat to this person&#x27;s job security, so it doesn&#x27;t happen. More high-level processes are not optimized because the scrum master defines everything.<p>* Technical debt. I see this time and time again. User Stories are supposed to be forecasts, not commitments. But the business doesn&#x27;t like stories carried over, so they become commitments. At the end of each sprint, everyone rushes to get their stuff done, and hacks are implemented to meet an arbitrary deadline. Many times I want to begin my work by refactoring something to what it needs to be first, then do the actual user story. But its risky because the refactoring might take more than the allocated story points, and you get dinged. So I do the story first, and if there is time do the refactoring but it almost never happens.<p>* Poor product owners. During maintenance phase, we could work on cleaning up technical debt, but this value is not appreciated by business so they keep us busy with bikeshedding. One gripe I have about scrum, is there is nobody representing engineering, as the product owner represents the business.<p>These things combined have dragged down the happiness of the people I work with, but we all feel imprisoned by it. I have a stack of scrum books here I plan on reading, I figure this process isn&#x27;t going away and I need to up my game with how to play it - but I wish I could use something else, perhaps kanban.