What is not said is how much damage Scrum has done to the Agile ecosystem. People get certified to do Scrum and then they proselytize it; but the fact is, what Scrum offers is only a small and unnecessary part of how an organization builds software. And by putting the focus on Scrum, it causes people to lose focus on what does matter.

Here are some things that matter a-lot more than whether you are doing standups:

1. Are team members collaborating?
2. In a multi-team environment, are the teams effectively addressing integration issues?
3. Are the test suites being maintained?
4. What is the test coverage? — and not just for the unit tests, but for all the many other categories of tests as well?
5. Was the automation put in place before work started, or did the team have to start in a crippled manner, like a car factory starting up before the equipment is in place?

The author also mentions Scrum’s idea of accountability: “accountability belongs to the Development Team as a whole”. But that simply doesn’t scale. An individual needs to be accountable for a team. And most teams need servant leadership. Self organization does not actually work that well most of the time. The Tuckman model — often cited by Scrum people — even states that!! It is an inconvenient truth.

Servant leadership is the key to success. And servant leadership is not what the Scrum community says it is: it is not merely facilitation. True servant leadership is explained in many books, and they make that clear. True servant leadership carries both authority and accountability, but a servant leader is not bossy and autocratic. An effective servant leader is always watching for things the team is missing, stimulating discussion, proposing ideas, and asking questions; and a true servant leader sometimes makes a decision, and the team is okay with that, because they have come to trust the servant leader — that the leader takes responsibility for his or her decisions.

A true servant leader wants to help the team to be as effective as possible, and wants the team’s capabilities to grow over time. But a true servant leader is still a leader.

Scrum misses that, perhaps because its author was a fighter pilot and a doctor — not someone who had spent years building software and leading software teams. Yet so many people follow Scrum as if it were written by a higher power. And it is not even compatible with Behavior-Driven Development, which requires a workflow like Kanban.