99.9% of “Scrum” you’ll come across in the wild is cargo cult. People performing the ceremonies with no fucking idea why, in the hope that the giant eagles will come from the sky bringing gifts.
Scrum was created to help good developers communicate with management. But the problem is that management has all the power and couldn’t give a shit. If the management was qualified to “get it” you probably wouldn’t need it.
So yeah, if you’re using Scrum, you’re probably going to fail: whatever the reason that you’re doing scrum? That’s why you’re gonna fail.
I once worked at a place that did Scrum for the exact reasons you mentioned.
Every user story was the same - “As a business owner, I want users to be able to do x”. Defeats the entire purposes of user stories. But they were told they had to write stories. So they did.
We also had our work planned out 6-12 months in advance.
It was top-down waterfall disguised as agile, which would have been acceptable if we didn’t also waste 5+ hours a week in daily standups (aka status reports), sprint planning, retros, story breakdowns, all of which were scheduled at the most inconvenient of times to ensure they interrupted your flow.
Scrum was created to help good developers communicate with management. But the problem is that management has all the power and couldn’t give a shit. If the management was qualified to “get it” you probably wouldn’t need it.
So yeah, if you’re using Scrum, you’re probably going to fail: whatever the reason that you’re doing scrum? That’s why you’re gonna fail.
Scrum is a fantastic canary.