Why I'm done with Scrum

An agile/scrum process is designed to work with tasks of inaccurate estimates - the whole business of story points is designed around that fact. Since your underlying phenomenon changed, the process was no longer optimal.

I'm not sure if you experimented with your own "lean" inventions beyond agile - single queues, multiple queues, queues with an artificial stop signal to reduce variance, etc. - but it would have been interesting.

No, there isn't. You adhere to your burn-down, not to your feature set. Scrum is time driven, not task driven. The whole idea is to become better at estimation so that Scrum appears task driven, when really it's just because your team is that good at estimating.

> Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive.

Then you're doing it wrong (god, I feel awful for saying that). If you're spending that much time in pre-sprint planning, people aren't bringing enough to the table and you're not defining your problems well enough before trying to solve them.

> I hate the term “scrum-but”.

Ironic that that sounds like exactly what the environment you were working in sounds like.

> This might be a bit controversial, but the big difference between Scrum and things like Lean Software Development for me were the difference of focusing on process versus delivery.

I think this is a "forest for the trees" issue. Scrum is about abstracting the process into a rigid and lightweight framework so you only have to think about it, at most, fifteen minutes a day (unless you have the misfortune of being the Scrum master/cat wrangler)

> It can’t, and it’s not a problem with your organization if it doesn’t. It’s a problem with Scrum.

That's a non-sequitur. It's a problem with neither. If my company can't implement a waterfall methodology because our clients require faster iteration, that doesn't mean there's a problem with either - it's just not a good fit.

But if your company tries to implement Scrum and throws it out six weeks or six months later because it's "too hard" or "bad," my assumption is that real Scrum probably wasn't happening.

Will Scrum work for everyone? Fuck no. Scrum is hard. It requires the kind of buy in that, if you've got it, you probably don't need Scrum anyway.

Can Scrum work for everyone? Probably. Scrum is only hard when you've got conflicting goals. If you have a smart enough team, you can tweak your sprint lengths from as little as a few days to as long as six to eight weeks, and after you've been on Scrum for a few sprints your planning meetings should take an hour or two, tops.

  Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive.
  Group discussion around design, group estimation, group 
  acceptance, all highly inefficient. [...] I remember just 
  getting bored to tears listening to discussions around 
  stories I wasn’t developing on to begin with.

If a team is structured in such a way that a developer knows they won't be working on a story, that seems like a logical line for splitting into two scrum teams.

Decoupling incrementalism from iterations has been a huge change for me.