Unfortunately, what teams do religiously is the process, contrary to the manifesto. So they put a Scrum Master pin on someone, they do Sprints and burndowns. They cargo cult.

I did my first CSM course with Ken Schwaber. I did another recently with someone else. The recent course was all process. Ken's course was mostly "why".

Jeff Sutherland said there are three things that must be true for a team to be a Scrum team:

1. It must be self-governing.

2. The team members must be on the team 100%

3. The team members must stay for the duration.

With the exception of start-ups, I've seen maybe one team which met these criteria. But they all had sprints. And of course, they were all held to their commitment. Scrum is now a tool for management to death march people.

Think of all these metrics that management measures scrum teams on. Can you imagine any of these teams turning around and saying, "We're going to measure how many of your bullshit wishlist items meet the definition of an actionable story when presented in sprint planning, and how many hours are wasted?" Of course not. Management can't abide a team that meets rule 1. "I'm a manager! I must manage! What is my job if my teams are self managing?!"

Scrum, as Ken Schwaber describes it, is a fantastic way to develop product. Unfortunately, if you are in an organization that would truly let you do Scrum, then you probably don't need it. You are already qualified, experienced and empowered. If its a hundred twenty-year-olds being told to "do scrum", it probably ain't Scrum.

Hear hear! Scrum predates Agile. It welcomes mixing in other tools as needed, e.g. XP, Agile, etc. After 15 years of professional software development, I just picked up a scrum master certificate a couple days ago after my employer paid for the class. I'd rather see teams using scrum than just winging it unless they are provably experienced or extraordinarily competent. Individuals can be good at their work but it's often difficult to get everything in sync on a team, or even if the team is super amazing the complexity of getting things done in a corporate environment with lots of moving parts and dependencies is usually aided by using tools such as scrum. Even when a complex corporate environment commits to trying to follow it, it's still a struggle to get the basic elements of scrum adhered to (enough time with product owner, enough time figuring out dependencies, any time at all spent identifying ways the team could do better in the future and reduce friction, impediments, or needless work). Take a look at the Scrum Guide - I'd be satisfied if just the few events in the minimal scrum framework could be fit in, but often not even that happens.

* edit: provably