This is part 2 of “A retrospective about a dead Scrum Master”.  Click here to read part 1.

During his first days on the project, the Scrum Master silently observed the people and their activities on the project. He roamed the floors and worked the phones to connect with all the people working on the project. He learned that 16 people, most of them distributed across several locations (and time zones), had been working on the project for 6 months. He was told that only very little functionality has been …

“Scrum does not work and I won’t even give it a try!”
— anonymous ignorant
This collection of all the ignorant statements I have come across since I have been using Scrum should help you reply to similar statements in case you will ever be confronted with them:

“Scrum does not work because it is not fault-tolerant”
“Sprint reviews are a waste of time! Let’s skip them!”
“Daily Scrums are micro-management! Let’s not do this!”
“Scrum is waterfall because you are working on stories consecutively!”

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a way to run Sprint retrospectives with the scrumdevelopment user group on Yahoo. I proposed to use the recent Sprint burn down chart during the Sprint retrospective as a guideline for the team: Instead of putting sticky notes with significant events on a rather abstract timeline representing the Sprint we put them directly on the respective Sprint burndown chart.
If you would like to know more, you may find a summary of the discussion on InfoQ: Tips to Improve Retrospectives.