I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).

My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.

Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.

The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:

- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.

- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)

- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)

The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.

Common themes:

- Communication is 2 way

- Both teams are friendly and competent

- Customer care about results and leave programming to us

- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.

Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!

Some examples:

- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates

- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall

- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid

- "release" after "release" but no actual customer

- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages