Additionally, many others have already argued against both the common implementation of Scrum, and its "ideal, perfect, theoretical" version. Just the idea of preserving asynchronous communication while introducing fixed, synchronous communication strikes me as an idea by someone who does not understand how people work.
Scrum as a set of process rules should not be particularly difficult for an engineering team to learn. I submit that if a team cannot operate under such a set of rules, it will be unable to adopt any set of process rules, and in addition to that, it will perform especially poorly under a system of no rules (i.e. direct rule by edicts from kings and queens).
Good lord it is exactly this kind religiosity that has me running for the exit.
I guess my question to you is, where are you exiting to? If you know of a process or methodology that is better and can articulate the reasons why, then I will gladly follow you!
This is in my OP that began the comment thread.
I guess I won’t be following you through that exit, but all the best and good luck for the future. I admire your courage in the pursuit of happiness.
Like, sure, you can make a team decision about what goes into this sprint, and what goes into the next one. But the management makes the decision what must be done in three or six months, and there is no negotiation about that.
There shouldn’t be deadlines every two weeks, instead you should be working towards a sprint goal. If the goal is not achieved then you can use that knowledge in the next sprint to reduce the amount of scope you try to complete. There are no deadlines per se, because deadlines try to fix scope and time, whereas a sprint only fixes time. The process of estimation and story pointing is where things become more art than science, but provided you are consistent in your approaches this mechanism prevents our inherent lack of foresight from becoming a catastrophic prediction failure.
Meetings like stand ups, retros, and backlog refinement can be super effective tools but they have to be run properly and tightly, otherwise they become worse than nothing.
I guess in this hypothetical team the thing to do would be to raise with the Scrum Master that you’re exhausted, raise in the retro that there are deficiencies in the process etc. and get back to a more sane baseline.