>However, the large amount of bathwater doesn't mean there isn't a baby there.
Applying generic systems analysis (where it doesn't matter whether it is protein building, network protocol flow or software engineering process) one can easily see that Scrum is a highly synchronous low-latency process (that is the "baby" that management loves) which comes at the cost of dramatically decreased bandwidth. In addition, changing a team's process inside, Scrum indirectly completely changes how the team interacts with up- and downstream teams/components - in particular on practice eliminating any chance for early integration and for any iterations of the integrations.
That became obvious to me during the first day at the first Scrum course, especially after i tried to ask those questions to the teaching Scrum expert from the consulting company and received blank face with some blabbing in response. Some time later, different company with different consultants - that first hand 2 year experience i described in the previous post - the Scrum drawbacks on practice happened to be even worse than i thought they may in theory. We actually have great time right now at our BigCo. as after the Scrum fiasco, and quietly dropping the Scrum company-wide as the result, the management still seems to be kind of "in shock", and they haven't brought up any new fad in the process improvement so far, so we're just doing typical old-fashioned per-feature waterfall, and it just works as usual - which is huge achievement compare to Scrum :)
I can't really answer for Scrum, especially as taught by consulting companies. I think of Scrum as a set of too-basic but reasonably good ideas that quickly ended up mostly as a certification scam. I wrote more about that a number of places, including here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
I think that's especially true for dramatic company-wide, top-down Agile adoptions, which I have never heard of working. I think people doing that cannot possibly understand Agile philosophy, which promotes local control and continuous improvement of top-down control and giant leaps.
My positive experience is mostly with smaller shops, but I've definitely seen many places where companies have grown up releasing early and often and have no problem working in what I'd consider good Agile style. Wealthfront, Etsy, and Spotify are all explicitly and openly like that. But I think there are plenty of other places that aren't explicitly Agile but ended up that way as a natural evolution.
For example, when I visited YouTube to study their process, there were a great number of developers, designers, and product managers all working in relatively independent small teams. They'd release at least weekly but sometimes more often. There was no overarching plan; each team had particular goals to pursue, and coordinated with other teams as needed. They never used Agile jargon and didn't think of themselves as Agile, but I think they were acting in ways that exactly matched the spirit.
Applying generic systems analysis (where it doesn't matter whether it is protein building, network protocol flow or software engineering process) one can easily see that Scrum is a highly synchronous low-latency process (that is the "baby" that management loves) which comes at the cost of dramatically decreased bandwidth. In addition, changing a team's process inside, Scrum indirectly completely changes how the team interacts with up- and downstream teams/components - in particular on practice eliminating any chance for early integration and for any iterations of the integrations.
That became obvious to me during the first day at the first Scrum course, especially after i tried to ask those questions to the teaching Scrum expert from the consulting company and received blank face with some blabbing in response. Some time later, different company with different consultants - that first hand 2 year experience i described in the previous post - the Scrum drawbacks on practice happened to be even worse than i thought they may in theory. We actually have great time right now at our BigCo. as after the Scrum fiasco, and quietly dropping the Scrum company-wide as the result, the management still seems to be kind of "in shock", and they haven't brought up any new fad in the process improvement so far, so we're just doing typical old-fashioned per-feature waterfall, and it just works as usual - which is huge achievement compare to Scrum :)