My firm introduced Scrum in 2023 and it's so clearly about #2.
* The sector of the business I'm in is 90% about integration with third-party services. How many sprints does it take to walk through their certification process? Depends how many cycles the third-party wants, how fast they respond, etc. So we end up checking in tasks representing "2 weeks of work" that really mean nothing so the points can be made up.
* The long-established policy (pre-scrum) involves several phases (development, another developer reviews, QA, final review by project manager). Any one can be a bottleneck. So if Frank in QA has enough points for his sprint, Dev Steve probably can't take on any more tasks even if he has capacity.
* This also works on a time scale; you're often going to end up with "last Thursday of the sprint, there's nothing left in the queue, and we have to twiddle our thumbs or possibly start some experimenting on next sprint's work" -- it's hardly a smooth process of "just keep pulling tasks".
* The primary outcome of all the meetings is that they complain "we're delivering 80% of our estimate one sprint, and 115% the next sprint, how can we be more predictable?"
Bearing in mind the number of points have nothing to do with actual achievements and business value; a huge spec uplift on the #1 partner can end up as fewer points than just endless weeks of dragon-chasing for a partner that will never deliver a dime of revenue.
* The sector of the business I'm in is 90% about integration with third-party services. How many sprints does it take to walk through their certification process? Depends how many cycles the third-party wants, how fast they respond, etc. So we end up checking in tasks representing "2 weeks of work" that really mean nothing so the points can be made up.
* The long-established policy (pre-scrum) involves several phases (development, another developer reviews, QA, final review by project manager). Any one can be a bottleneck. So if Frank in QA has enough points for his sprint, Dev Steve probably can't take on any more tasks even if he has capacity.
* This also works on a time scale; you're often going to end up with "last Thursday of the sprint, there's nothing left in the queue, and we have to twiddle our thumbs or possibly start some experimenting on next sprint's work" -- it's hardly a smooth process of "just keep pulling tasks".
* The primary outcome of all the meetings is that they complain "we're delivering 80% of our estimate one sprint, and 115% the next sprint, how can we be more predictable?"
Bearing in mind the number of points have nothing to do with actual achievements and business value; a huge spec uplift on the #1 partner can end up as fewer points than just endless weeks of dragon-chasing for a partner that will never deliver a dime of revenue.