Episode 2/10 of Demystifying top 10 Agile & Scrum Myths:

True agile means Scrum.

9 min readFeb 25, 2024

Basics first! In order to unravel this myth it’s important to set the scene first and start with getting some consensus on used terms.

We’ll have to talk about the goal of ‘agile’, and that’s to increase agility. Agility as defined by the Cambridge dictionary:

Ways of planning and doing work in which it is understood that making changes as they are needed is an important part of the job.

‘Agile’ as used in this article, has been a methodology since the 2001’s publication of the ‘Manifesto for Agile Software Development’, but I would for the sake of understanding like you to think of it as a strategy, which aims to achieve true agility.

The current hype that all the cool Agile coaches talk about, is whether or not ‘Agile’ is dead. This talks directly about how effective Agile has been ‘implemented’ to reach said agility, but at the same time nobody refutes the fact that achieving agility is in the current and probably future economic landscape increasingly necessary.

‘Scrum’ is a framework with clear rules, roles and responsibilities and values, and can be seen as a tactic to adopt the above strategy. The fact that it’s the most used agile framework (61%) is the probable one of the main reasons both get in one breath and the lines are faded to many.

Scrum however predates the agile manifesto by at least ten years. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are the founding fathers of Scrum and used their experience with Scrum together with experts of other frameworks to draft the agile manifesto during a long skiing weekend, which captures values and principles that links those frameworks together.

So very much like a chicken is a bird, but being a bird does not mean being a chicken. Practicing Scrum correctly means adhering to Agile values & principle, but adhering to the Agile values & principles does not mean necessarily using Scrum.

The above should give you plenty of information to bust the myth that ‘Agile’ does not equal ‘Scrum’, where it differs and where the mix-up originates from, but here’s where the fun part of this blog post only really starts…

More than just Scrum

There’s multiple tactics to embrace agility and Scrum is only one of them, so that opens up the question: What are the others and what place do they have?

Have you gone shopping with somebody else’s shopping list where you are faced with a seemingly easy task like ‘get cornflakes’, only to be confronted by a huge wall of colourful avatars, brands and beautiful artwork? Well that can easily be the case as well when talking about all the frameworks out there that could be on our shopping list of ‘embracing agility’.

As I often have to remind my wife that I’m not lazy, but I’m actually just very time and energy efficient and those traits are exactly what the likes of Bill Gates are supposedly looking for, I’ve of course tried to find a compass through the jungle, since attempting to master all those frameworks would mean a huge waste of my time and energy.

As one of the more unknown programming languages that my squads use is Python, I’ve tried to implement (with help from ChatGPT) a model to rank the most used agile frameworks.

So how do I use it, and how do I think you should use this? Have a chat with your peers, or team members, managers or any other relevant stakeholders on their view of the current standings. You can use this scan and save the stakeholders input, to be able to average it out and get input from multiple perspectives.

Also doing this with your PO & managers will be very helpful in seeing by which metrics they will be held accountable and will better put you in a position to guide your teams to success by either coaching your PO or organisation, or setting your team to meet and exceed expectations.

The above part is in my perspective is where our ‘real’ value comes from as agile coaches & Scrum masters, we guide our teams to making a valuable impact. There is not a silver bullet Framework that is best suited for reaching all types of value, so it’s good to be able to differentiate and widen your horizon.

To a person with only a hammer, everything will start to look like a nail.

AgileFrameworkSelector usage:

I’d like to welcome you to fork & run my application for free on https://replit.com/@ivanduchateau44/AgileFrameworkSelector#main.py

It will give you insight into the exact parameter values used and will enable you to customise it to better leverage off any learnings you’ve had yourself. I’ll demo how I can use it for a theoretical team:

The 7 criterions explained to get to a peronsalised suggestion:
  Scalability: The ability of the framework to adapt to large and complex projects involving multiple teams.
  Flexibility: The ease with which the framework can accommodate changes in requirements, scope, or technology throughout the project lifecycle.
  Quality: The emphasis the framework places on ensuring the high quality of the final product through practices like testing, reviews, and continuous integration.
  Delivery: The focus on delivering working increments of the product frequently and efficiently to the customer.
  Iterative Development: The approach of developing the product through repeated cycles (iterations), allowing for incremental improvement and adaptation based on feedback.
  Efficiency: The framework's effectiveness in optimizing resources, time, and effort to achieve the project goals with minimal waste.
  Complexity Management: The ability to handle and simplify complex project requir

The program will prompt you to fill in your own values for each value, in my case it was the following:

It will then rank the frameworks based on the 7 criterion per framework and your personal input. In my case I’d get the following output:

Now this is where the difficult part comes in, because what do you do with this? A good possibility would be to dive deeper into the detailed match with your top frameworks. In my case I’d investigate on ScrumBan and check where I have a ‘mismatch’ and how relevant it is for me.

So the biggest ‘mismatch’ is complexity and flexibility and it could be beneficial to inspect just how important these aspects are to manage in reality. If the biggest mis matches are based on something that’s an actual point you’d like to weigh a particular high amount of gravity on, then it may be a concern that you’d like to take in consideration, before moving forward.

Similarly, you could also check against your currently used framework, which is in my case Scrum, and inspect what the biggest mismatches.

Unlocking evolutionary improvements

The above example of using the tool told you how to inspect your current process, way of working and compare it with Frameworks. You could also turn it around and have a vision to use certain Framework(s) in your environment.

Doing this scan can give you a clear indication into what should be a focal point you could invest in, to get your framework to work better for you. Let’s say I’d want to move towards Scrum and had the below results:

In this case the ‘Iterative’ part is the clear outlier and could be a focal point to make Scrum work better for your teams. In practice goals could look like:

Decrease time to market
Decrease cycle time
Increase value of customer feedback

By using it this way, you can use the above script to evolutionary improve your way of working and give you an easily defined area to act on.

You could follow-up these sessions by describing the ‘desired’ values. What do you think is the direction we should be heading to? Working more iteratively with incremental product deliveries, or should we be able to scale more easily since we’re expecting to upscale with multiple teams potentially? Regardless of what input you’ll get, it will give you clear talking points and if you’re put on the spot, you can impress your managers with situational Agile awareness. Just make sure to not make any promises and read the next paragraph, before you’re about to implement something new.

Unlocking revolutionary improvements

If you were willing to base your decision on what framework you’re going to embrace based on above script, then please refrain from introducing any framework, since it involves way more than this.

Revolutionary changes are incredibly powerful, but also very dangerous, so handle with care. If you see any framework that you think should be implemented instead of what you’re using now, don’t go rogue and start running, but at least take a step back and do the following:

Verify your input with other stakeholders, taking into account multiple perspectives often make for a more reliable situation analysis and removes bias.
Discuss with your stakeholders why the initial framework was selected. Identify possible concerns to move away from it and what could convince them to support you in moving away from it.
Gain knowledge, or find a knowledgeable person to guide you in this explorative stage, being able to address the outcomes of step 1 & 2.
Only afterwards assess if the move is worth the disruption and change in a structured manner, which can be presented to sponsors & stakeholders, or if there’s best practices you can implement based on your new insights into the current way of working to reduce risk of failure.

The above steps may seem like quite a bit of work, and quite honestly it is. But if you’re not willing to put in that work, then you and your teams are probably better off in a suboptimal approach rather than embarking on some wild adventure without proper preparation and buy-in.

End notes

Writing this blog has brought me a very high over insight into different Agile frameworks that I did not have any exposure to yet, and I hope I can offer you the same.

Besides that it has given me a good opportunity to talk in a structured manner about values and priorities in ways of working with my important stakeholders, which helps me set up my teams for success, and I hope this blogpost and program will give you a chance to do the exact same!

In my case I’m focussing on ScrumBan & Kanban, this does not mean I’ll be implementing those frameworks, but it does mean that focussing my time and energy on learning those frameworks and it’s value propositions better will be an effective use of my time and energy, because it will fulfil the true purpose of a scrum master or agile coach in making team’s efforts more meaningful and deliver more value.

And with that last statement, you’ll also understand my view on what agile practitioners should be focussing on. Don’t get stuck on framework bashing, debating on the state of Agile and the likes. If you’re only complaining then it means you either don’t get it, or that you’re stuck on a sinking ship, regardless of which one is true, you better start thinking about moving on if you can’t adapt and actually embrace real agility, but only preach what you already know.

Since I’m very new to blogging, any feedback would be greatly appreciated in any form, so please do leave a comment on what you liked most, or what you think should definitely be adapted.

Reference links to different frameworks/methodologies

In case your curiosity sparked about one or more frameworks and how their detailed workings, please check out the links below. If you don’t know where to start, please make sure to run the script for yourself and to do it together with you colleagues, I can tell you first hand that it makes for nice conversations and gives much insight through perspectives other than your own. I am far from an expert on most of the frameworks, and if you have more valuable resources I should link here, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Kanban: https://kanbanguides.org/english/

SAFE: https://scaledagileframework.com/

XP (Extreme Programming): http://www.extremeprogramming.org/

Lean (product development):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_product_development

FDD (Feature Driven Development): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature-driven_development

DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_method

Crystal: https://www.wrike.com/agile-guide/faq/what-is-agile-crystal-methodology/

ScrumBan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrumban

LeSS (Large Scale Scrum): https://less.works/

Nexus: https://www.scrum.org/resources/online-nexus-guide

DAD (Disciplined Agile Delivery):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_agile_delivery