if you look closely, I didn't say Scrum IS agile cosplay.... I said it encourages it. IMHO The problem with Scrum is that the nature of Scrum encourages the abuse of it. It is ripe for gaming, ripe for making jobs that didn't need to be jobs, adding busywork, etc.
I work in technical diligence, and have personally interviewed about ~60 companies now on their processes among other things. I have definitely seen good, high-functioning Scrum! But I see it abused more, and in my experience every scrum team I've been on suffers those problems, whether mild or extreme. I just don't think choosing a process that sets you up for organizational process abuse is a good plan.
Left to my own devices, I would use a combination of Kanban and XP, with Scrum retrospectives. Figuring out how many things can fit precisely in the next two weeks would be the first thing on the chopping block - mostly a waste of time and gamed all the time.
Of course the real elephant in the room is that agile at its fundamental core is predicated on good automated testing and most teams don't have good automated testing. I would estimate ~10-20% of teams I talk to are actually doing agile as it was intended in the manifesto. (And these are companies that are getting major investments or aquisitions, or we wouldn't be talking to them). :-/
Very fair points. There's a lot of cheap Agile-bashing online, on LinkedIn, etc. and it often comes down to folks missing many of the points you make here.
Scrum isn't the be-all and end-all, but like many things people like to deride, it ultimately comes down to someone saying "that Agile Manifesto sounds great, but what do I actually need to DO?"
I work in technical diligence, and have personally interviewed about ~60 companies now on their processes among other things. I have definitely seen good, high-functioning Scrum! But I see it abused more, and in my experience every scrum team I've been on suffers those problems, whether mild or extreme. I just don't think choosing a process that sets you up for organizational process abuse is a good plan.
Left to my own devices, I would use a combination of Kanban and XP, with Scrum retrospectives. Figuring out how many things can fit precisely in the next two weeks would be the first thing on the chopping block - mostly a waste of time and gamed all the time.
Of course the real elephant in the room is that agile at its fundamental core is predicated on good automated testing and most teams don't have good automated testing. I would estimate ~10-20% of teams I talk to are actually doing agile as it was intended in the manifesto. (And these are companies that are getting major investments or aquisitions, or we wouldn't be talking to them). :-/