Next time someone tells me at a job interview that they use "scrum", I will ask them two questions: 1) do you have retrospectives, and what typically happens t

Next time someone tells me at a job interview that they use "scrum", I will ask them two questions: 1) do you have retrospectives, and what typically happens there? 2) have you ever changed anything, as a result of the feedback given by developers at the retrospective? please provide a specific example. If they say "no" to either of these questions, it is the bad kind of scrum. If they say "yes", and give any non-bullshit answer to the second one (for example "we had 2-week sprints but then developers changed it to 3-weeks" or vice versa; the exact details are not important), it has a chance to be the good kind of scrum. If someone says "we don't do retrospectives, because they are a waste of time", they are kinda right, but for the wrong reasons. The retrospective is where developers provide feedback about the process, and can choose to change it. If you have a strictly top-down managed company with zero developer autonomy, in such case having retrospectives is indeed a waste of time, because no matter what the developers might say, nothing ever changes as a consequence. But that doesn't mean that the retrospectives suck; it just means that the company sucks.