Scrum-but: The Unofficial Agile Methodology
Description
This meme uses the popular 'Well yes, but actually no' format, which features a claymation pirate captain from the movie 'The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!'. The top text, in a bold white impact font, asks, 'SO, YOUR TEAM DOES SCRUM?'. The pirate captain, with a hesitant and slightly misleading expression, gestures as the bottom text, in yellow, delivers the punchline: 'Well yes, but actually no'. This meme perfectly encapsulates the widespread phenomenon in the software industry known as 'Scrum-but' or 'cargo cult Agile,' where teams adopt the ceremonies and terminology of Scrum (like sprints and stand-ups) but fail to embrace the core principles of continuous improvement, feedback loops, and empowerment. For senior developers, this is a deeply familiar and often frustrating scenario, representing a superficial adoption of Agile practices that yields none of the benefits and often adds more overhead
Comments
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We're technically doing Scrum. Our sprints are six weeks long, the daily stand-up is a two-hour status report for management, and 'done' means it compiles on one developer's machine
Our “Scrum” playbook: 1) rename the Monday status call to “stand-up,” 2) export the Gantt chart to PNG and label it “burn-down,” 3) keep the annual release - congratulations, we’re agile now
We do Scrum, except sprints are quarterly, the PO writes all the stories during planning, retrospectives are optional, and our definition of done changes based on who's asking - but we have daily standups, so we're definitely Agile
We do Scrum: two-week waterfalls with daily confessionals and a retro nobody acts on
Every team 'does Scrum' until you ask about their Definition of Done, observe their two-hour daily standups, notice the six-month sprints, or discover that their 'Product Owner' is actually a committee of twelve stakeholders who've never seen the backlog. It's Scrum in the same way that renaming your waterfall phases to 'Sprint 1' through 'Sprint 47' is 'agile transformation.'
Classic Scrumbut: WaterScrum-Fall - waterfall requirements, Scrum theater, waterfall delivery
Yes, we do Scrum - full ceremony, zero empiricism: Sprint Goal is “cope,” DoD ends at “merged,” and velocity is calibrated to the quarterly slide deck
We “do Scrum”: two‑week waterfalls, standups as status, points pegged to hours, and velocity as the KPI - aka Water‑Scrum‑Fall as a Service