One finger death punch to Scrum

tl;dr; You can kill Scrum really easily. If you want to. With odd reporting.

Data

They are everywhere, they are everything and they rule the world.
As any other material, you can use them in good faith for a good purpose or use them for a bad one. It just depends on the person’s intentions. Just like a knife that you can use it to slice the bread or threaten your neighbor.

It just depends on the person’s intentions

A valuable aggregator of data

Most project management tools are Scrum-ready. They support the Scrum workflow and its artifacts. They may also be integrated with version control hosting services, like GitHub. So they turn to be valuable aggregators of data that also contain the team members, the items they have taken over, each item’s velocity and the dates that an item started to be developed and considered done.

You can see what you can do with that set of data… Reporting!
Some reports can get too nasty:

• the average velocity the person X accomplishes during a sprint
• how much time in hours is the velocity Z
• does a person cost more money than she/he produces (by converting velocity to hours and then to cost)?

Velocity is an abstract unit (not hours, days or cups of coffee) that describes the effort to accomplish an item. Its a unit of estimation.

What’s wrong with reporting?

Scrum does not contain any odd reporting. You can naturally see that it couldn’t fit into Scrum. It feels like its against its culture. Also, based on the Scrum guide, no team role has the authority to do this.

Motivation is described as very important in the Scrum guide and I’m pretty sure that the developers would not feel happy if they knew their keystrokes are converted to bucks, or that there is some unknown velocity racing between the team members.

Last but not least, as the Scrum guide says:

Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum.