Many engineering orgs just give lip service to scrum, which is as good as not doing it, which is good and works better. Meaning, in my experience: You work in a priority queue, that priority queue is re-synced with stakeholders (at least) once every two weeks, retros may be there as an opportunity to get other business verticals into the room to see what engineering finished recently, and the concept of "a ticket going over to the next sprint" doesn't raise blood pressure, because the system is designed for this and sprints aren't deadlines. Features might have deadlines, absolutely, but that's independent of the sprint.
I've worked at ~three places that operated similar to this; "minimum viable scrum" is a good name, or even better, "emergent scrum" because it isn't a process that's designed, its the process that emerges when someone toggles the "agile/scrum" button in Jira, but no one really cares one way or the other. Its a good process.
I've worked in one environment that was hard scrum, had scrum masters, extremely strict. To be honest: I felt almost no stress, but the company also delivered very little. There was a lot of "we can't get to swapping the color on that button until Sprint 18 in three months, but we'll schedule it for then". Missing a sprint was life or death, so every estimate got padded like crazy. When you took vacation, it was common knowledge that you needed to leave halfway through a sprint and come back halfway through another, sprint planning would basically forget about you. That (public tech) company doesn't exist anymore, and it radicalized me against agile/scrum: The entropic end-state of perfectly executed agile/scrum is an extremely well-lubricated machine that actually does very little.
I've worked at ~three places that operated similar to this; "minimum viable scrum" is a good name, or even better, "emergent scrum" because it isn't a process that's designed, its the process that emerges when someone toggles the "agile/scrum" button in Jira, but no one really cares one way or the other. Its a good process.
I've worked in one environment that was hard scrum, had scrum masters, extremely strict. To be honest: I felt almost no stress, but the company also delivered very little. There was a lot of "we can't get to swapping the color on that button until Sprint 18 in three months, but we'll schedule it for then". Missing a sprint was life or death, so every estimate got padded like crazy. When you took vacation, it was common knowledge that you needed to leave halfway through a sprint and come back halfway through another, sprint planning would basically forget about you. That (public tech) company doesn't exist anymore, and it radicalized me against agile/scrum: The entropic end-state of perfectly executed agile/scrum is an extremely well-lubricated machine that actually does very little.