I am a big fan of agile development and used XP on a very successful project a few years ago. I loved everything about it, the iterative development approach, writing code around a test, pair programming, having a customer on site to run things by. It was a highly productive work environment and I never felt like I was under pressure.
However the last few places I have worked use/used Scrum. I know it's the poster child for agile development these days but I'm not 100% convinced it is agile. Below are the two main reasons why it just doesn't feel agile to me.
Project Managers Love It
Project managers, who by their very nature are obsessed with timelines, all seem to love Scrum. In my experience they seem to use the Sprint Backlog as a means to track time requirements and keep a record of how much time was spent on a given task. Instead of using a whiteboard they all use an excel sheet, which each developer is required to fill out, religiously.
In my opinion this is way too much documentation/time tracking for an agile process. Why would I waste time estimating how long a task is going to take me when I can just get on with the task itself. Or similarly why would I waste time documenting how long a task took when I can move onto the next task at hand.
Standup Meetings
The standup meetings in the previous place I worked were a nightmare. Everyday we had to explain what we had done yesterday and what what we were going to do that day. If we went over on our time "estimate" for a task the project manager would kick up a stink, and reference the Sprint Backlog as a means of showing of incompetent you are for not adhering to the timeline.
Now I understand the need for communication but surely the tone of daily meetings should be lighthearted and focus on knowledge sharing. I don't think it should turn into a where's your homework style charade. Also surely the hole point of agile is that timelines change, they shouldn't be set in stone.
Conclusion
The idea of agile is to make the software better by making the developers life easier. Therefore in my opinion any agile process used by a team should be developer led. I don't think having a project manager use a process they have labeled "agile" to track a project has anything to do with agile development.
Thoughts anyone?
Best Answer
There are certain elements in Scrum which are more prone to perversion, but to be frank, what you are describing is the result of trying to get a organisation to adopt Scrum without educating all the stakeholding parties as to what it's all about, how it works and why it works. You need buy-in across the entire company to get results.
Any agile transformation is going to expose everything bad that's going on in your organisation, including, but not limited to, micromanagers, powerhungry people with their own agendas, insufficiently trained developers, communication silos, etc. If there's no collective will to address these issues and you just "do standups" and just "work in sprints", the Scrum implementation is going to fall flat on its face.
I can not stress this enough: if you want to do Scrum, you need competent coaches who can show you the path. It's not enough to read Essential Scrum and then just see where it gets you...