Another observation I have had, it provides much clearer and realistic progress reports to management. You can track the normalized points per day executed by

Another observation I have had, it provides much clearer and realistic progress reports to management. You can track the normalized points per day executed by the team to see their overall velocity. You have clear check points about what has been accomplished (which is why a shipped product is critical, it removes any chance for something not to meet DOD) On the dev side, I have never attended so many meetings. Technical debt being addressed is generally against the feedback loop, unless the PO/Leads of the team make it their first priority. Grooming meetings are a mix of people who care, those who don't, and vague stories. To save time, any new story got sent to one of the devs for a sniff test before grooming, to help ask critical questions early. Typically, the request is reasonable, but may run into a contradiction of the system. I have also found that, forcing scrum (or waterfall) on a product that is running at a difference release methodology is horrible. Got a customer that needs a new thing built by a specific date? That won't fit, unless the date is flexible and customer stake holders can be deeply involved in the process. Waterfall at least forces the customer to define the project up front and allows for calling out changes to the plan and thus changes to the scope. As with all the above, this sits on how skilled your project manager/scrum master/product owner are at their jobs. Anti patterns abound.