“Either someone has an incomplete understanding of the approaches, or they’re forming their opinion through the lens of an unsuccessful implementation attempt.”

OR, Scrum by itself is insufficient, but misguides people, by focusing on things that matter little and distracting people from the things that actually do matter.

Scrum people debate endlessly about story splitting, and the format of team retros, and minute nuances of standup format. Guess what? None of that matters!!!!

What matters is whether the team has effective leadership — servant leadership. Not servant leadership the way that Scrum defines it, but true servant leadership, which is a form of actual leadership and includes accountability and decisionmaking.

What also matters is a relentless focus on the delivery process — all the technical things that happen, and how they are done, and how they can be streamlined, to get fully tested deployable increments ready on a frequent basis. Scrum Masters who are not interested in technical things tend to steer retros toward the touchy-feely subjects, and so the important pipeline issues don’t get discussed enough.

Also, the Scrum process does not work well for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), which is a critical practice for frequently creation of deployable increments. Scrum does not work well for BDD because BDD is inherently a workflow, better suited to something process oriented like Kanban than Scrum.

A focus on Scrum is an Agile “smell”. Organizations that really do tech right don’t hold themselves to Scrum: they think for themselves. That’s why Google has extended team member roles such as site reliability engineer, and why Spotify ditched Scrum and came up with its own approach.

Don’t adopt Scrum. Learn what Scrum says, learn about Kanban, and — for heaven’s sake — learn about DevOps practices, and then start applying ideas as you need them, to make things work better.