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“Scrum is not fault-tolerant! It causes too many issues! Hence Scrum does not work!”
– anonymous ignorant

Of all the ignorant statements about Scrum I heard during the last weeks, this is my favorite one. It clearly shows that some people still don’t get the principles of Scrum: Scrum is not meant to be fault-tolerant. If it was, projects and teams would not be able to improve. Instead, Scrum has been designed to make everything clearly visible which is blocking the team from getting their work done (to deliver working software at the end of each Sprint) and from becoming more productive.
If you are new to Scrum and about to apply Scrum to your project or organization, expect issues (we call them impediments) to come up. If you don’t find any impediments, you are not looking hard enough! Keep asking yourself, the team and the product owner what could be done to make the project or the organization more productive.

And when you start hunting down these impediments, prepare yourself for some hard and sometimes frustrating time. As Scrum practitioners keep saying, “Scrum is easy to understand but difficult to implement!”.

Please read “Sprint reviews are waste of time” for an example of why it is vital to resolve impediments.