Why I'm done with Scrum

I would prefer Scrum can be costly... it will also remain costly if people don't actually do the inspect and adapt bits of scrum and aim to improve the process.

I say this as somebody who is actually not a huge fan of Scrum :-)

Obviously it is more productive to silo specific knowledge to specific people, generally the expert (or more motivated) in that field.

Actually - I often find that isn't true. If you silo knowledge then those people become bottlenecks in the process. Since their the only people everything has to flow through them that relates to that topic.

For example I find that teams improve if the "UX Expert" switches from being the person who does all of the UX work, to being the person who facilitates UX work among the whole team.

That way the easy stuff gets done by the whole team, and the UX person is freed up to focus on the tricky stuff and stops being a bottleneck for general progress on the UX front.

I see no feedback loop for the process itself

Is just nonsense :-)

Scrum has only five events - and two of those are retrospectives (one on the increment, one on the process used). If you aren't inspecting and adapting the process then you are not doing Scrum.

Now I freely admit that one of the most common ways that people don't do Scrum is by skipping those steps. Then again it's also the most common way I see people do kanban/lean badly as well.

You'll likely find Jeff Patton's work of interest - this might be a good starting point http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/emerging_best_agile_ux_pr....

There's a stack of stuff under https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:agile/t:ux that you may find interesting. Some of it may need filtering through my brain before you see the agile/ux connection though :-)

The UX track at Agile 2012 had a bunch of great sessions around getting UX and agile running well together (bias warning - I produced the track :-) http://agile2012.sched.org/overview/type/user+experience - I think all the sessions have slides now. Nag me if not.

There are also the sessions from Agile UX NYC earlier this year http://agileuxnyc.com/presentations/

Personally I'm finding UX works better outside of an iteration context with a more lean/kanban approach. The stuff Janice Fraser is doing at LUXr for example http://www.slideshare.net/clevergirl/. Google around the "Lean UX" topic. Ignore the folk who talk about it as if it's just about less deliverables. It's more than that.

Finally the agile usability mailing list http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-usability/ is a useful place to chat about this sort of stuff.

For example a pattern I've seen a few times goes something like this:

* Teams get good at breaking down and estimating backlog items, they tend to all become the same "size" and need about the same amount of "work"

* Product Owners get good at prioritising the work so that the most valuable stories are at the top of the queue

* Dev team and product owner turn have a collaborative relationship rather than a boss-minions relationship.

* The combination of those three factors means that the planning meeting basically turns into "we do the next N stories" where N is the number of stories you get done every sprint. So the utility of this meeting disappears.

* The process of work flowing through the team starts resembling single-piece flow. Everybody works on the next most important thing.

* People start continually delivering, rather that just being able to deliver at the end of the sprint.

* The last two points mean the utility of breaking work into sprints kind of vanishes.

* Everybody notices that they're doing flow-ish things rather than batch sprint-ish things and starts looking to the lean / kanban world for ways to optimise the process further.