One of the things I strive for in my work is to make sure that when people are doing Scrum, they are really doing it. My reasoning is that if you are going to go through all the effort and extra burden of Scrum, you might as well do it right and then decide if it is worth it. Unfortunately, in the course of my time helping teams implement Scrum I have seen a lot of what I would call “bad Scrum” and teams jettison the process without really doing (most of) it. Here are the common anti-patterns I have come across in the last year.

“We are doing Scrum, but …”

1. “… we don’t have a Product Backlog.”
2. “… the Product Owner does not prioritize our work.”
3. “… our manager tells me what to do.”
4. “… our ScrumMaster tells me what to do.”
5. “… the only thing we do is fill out the Excel spreadsheet .”
6. “… we don’t meet everyday ’cause we all work right next to each other.”
7. “… we don’t do Retrospectives.”
8. “… I just email my status to the ScrumMaster.”
9. “… there are too many meetings. Can we cut some of the meetings?”
10. “… it does not improve the quality of our product.”
11. “… it still feels like business as usual.”
12. “… no one removes obstacles.”