My biggest irritations with Scrum center around point assignment and the 'emergent architecture' on green-field projects. In those areas, I think that simply f

My biggest irritations with Scrum center around point assignment and the 'emergent architecture' on green-field projects. In those areas, I think that simply following the Scrum ritual is not necessarily harmful, however it is almost surely _not enough_. At least one person needs to have read through the scattered stories, built a mental model of the project's function, and have enough experience to start forming a notion of how things will work given the resources available. Better yet, if everyone has done that and can collaborate on a sketch of the architecture. Without this, all of the points poker is just Ouija board voodoo for the non-tech stake holders because nobody could possibly know how much effort it will be to build that 'Implement a button to do-complicated-reporting-process' down in the backlog. However, I have witnessed several teams where conversation around architecture and data model simply doesn't happen. On sprint one, everyone gets some stories, and goes off to do their thing. What you get is a minimally-coherent-to-satisfy-the-story data model and massive duplication of effort and code. That problem should be taken care of with story grooming and the regular, deliberate, refactoring and tech-debt pay down but I don't see that happen very often in practice. Everyone is in too much of a hurry to stop and say 'wait, this code is demonstrably garbage and we're doing it wrong'. They just build around the weird, wrong, or inefficient parts and get their stories finished.