I also find this to be the case. Developers have a minimum number of tickets / points we have to close every week. The number of points per ticket is decided by committee and in that committee there are developers of vastly different skills but all have the same minimum.
But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discovered by QA days / hours before release.
Although this could just be an issue with where I work as opposed to scrum / agile. :)
Yeah, this has nothing to do with scrum/agile. The number of points needs to be decided by the team of developers that's going to pick up those stories. There's to minimum number of tickets or points, you pick up what you can, and the number of points you average over a couple of sprints, helps to estimate how much time future work will take.
It seems a lot of companies are cargo-culting scrum.
But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discovered by QA days / hours before release.
Although this could just be an issue with where I work as opposed to scrum / agile. :)