Scrum Horror Stories

Today I talked with some fellow Scrum practitioners about failures. Failed projects and failed sprints. What some of them had to share was truly scarry. On person had his manager trying to play the product owner role. Yikes! IMHO that should never happen. It is a conflict of interest plain and simple. Another described how technical debt was accumulating because the product owner didn't care about the build-up of bugs. Talk about asleep at the wheel!

All this made me think there ought to be a 'You are not doing SCRUM - IF...' list that SCRUM coaches and trainers teach to the neophytes. Here's my 1st crack at this list:

Your are NOT doing Scrum IF....

- your manager is your 'Product Owner'
- your Sprint Backlog Tasks are consistently larger than 16 hours
- your product owner never participates in your sprint reviews
- your developers are spending all their time in meetings
- your product backlog was written on a napkin (sans priorities)