I have been trying for ages to articulate 'what happened to Agile' and recently had what I felt was a minor breakthrough.
Part of our problem is conflating practices with processes.
Scrum is all process, but few of them. XP has fewer processes than Scrum, but way more practices. Practices, by the way, that I've heard asserted more than once are the difference between a successful or a failed Scrum team - that successful Scrum teams are using half of XP. In other words, Scrum is simply underreporting the number and variety of success factors, making it look much simpler than it really is.
Almost all of the process in Scrum is performative. It's social. It's the parts that we have always struggled with, and that's precisely why the business folks 'ruined' Scrum so easily. XP is overwhelmingly practices of craftsmanship, a concept which some of the best of us enthusiastically embrace, and which remain opaque to people focused exclusively on emotional intelligence. The worst among us don't like the focus on self improvement. They'd rather talk their way out of it, and you can do quite a bit of talking in Scrum.
Part of our problem is conflating practices with processes.
Scrum is all process, but few of them. XP has fewer processes than Scrum, but way more practices. Practices, by the way, that I've heard asserted more than once are the difference between a successful or a failed Scrum team - that successful Scrum teams are using half of XP. In other words, Scrum is simply underreporting the number and variety of success factors, making it look much simpler than it really is.
Almost all of the process in Scrum is performative. It's social. It's the parts that we have always struggled with, and that's precisely why the business folks 'ruined' Scrum so easily. XP is overwhelmingly practices of craftsmanship, a concept which some of the best of us enthusiastically embrace, and which remain opaque to people focused exclusively on emotional intelligence. The worst among us don't like the focus on self improvement. They'd rather talk their way out of it, and you can do quite a bit of talking in Scrum.