Scrum is a great project management technique. Very flexible and engineering agnostic. Anyone can use it in their organization. I think that is why it has become so popular.

I too would like to see coaching of engineering best practices. I don’t think that all engineering practices are for everyone. However, there must be a certain subset that everyone can agree on.

It’s not just you.

As a long-time San Francisco resident, I’ve followed the development of Burning Man, which I think has some lessons for the Agile movement.

Both are movements started by people whose different ideas led to different experiences, the lessons of which they wanted to share more widely. Both started out as bottom-up, peer-to-peer efforts. Both ended up with organizations with well-paid, full-time professionals. Both face questions from early participants about whether the organizations are really serving the purpose and fulfilling the promise of the early days.

I think part of the problem faced in both worlds is the ease with which an organization’s primary purpose shifts from doing the work to making sure the organization survives and thrives. That shift always seems very reasonable at the time; survival is immediate, while the work is vaguer, and can be pushed off to the future. And the shift is especially reasonable to the people whose salaries depend on the organization. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I wish the Scrum community the best of luck in sorting all this out.