Fixing Your Scrum

Chapter 2Why Scrum Goes Bad

Scrum itself doesn’t go bad—it’s the ways that organizations implement it that can be problematic. We frequently see people changing the Scrum framework to fit their organization rather than the organization itself changing. Changing an organization can be slow and frustrating, but the whole point of adopting Scrum is to switch to a more efficient and empowering way of creating products, so change is a must.

We’ve experienced, and sometimes even promoted, many of the Scrum anti-patterns that we’ll describe in this book. The root cause of these anti-patterns is typically policies that have been in place since long before the company adopted Scrum. Such longstanding policies can sometimes make what Scrum brings to ...