Part of the joy of a dysfunctional organization is how that dysfunction shows in how they adopt processes. If you're an experienced scrum practitioner and you

Part of the joy of a dysfunctional organization is how that dysfunction shows in how they adopt processes. If you're an experienced scrum practitioner and you don't have criticisms of scrum, that's unusual enough I find it hard to take you seriously. Like any tool, even if you love the tool, if you don't have any criticism of it, my first instinct is to think you haven't really used it that much. The source of the "Get Out of Jail Free Card" is that there is no belief in a "one-size fits all" agile methodology. If you don't adapt ("continuously change") Scrum to fit your organization & team, it's very unlikely you'll succeed. Similarly, if you only adopt portions of the methodology without a lot of deliberation (and experimentation), it's very unlikely you'll succeed. Scrum (and one could say the same thing about any methodology) is a very delicate balance of tensions between various trade-offs. Organizational have their own unique tensions, and you have to adjust your methodology's trade-offs to fit your organization to establish that balance. It's even harder than it sounds, because organizations have such massive inertia. Changing organizational behaviours is difficult and slow. My observation has been that when you bring a new methodology (any methodology!) into an organization, you're typically going to find that at least initially, the methodology changes more than the organization. I usually find that for a large enough organization, barring some massive disruption to the organization (like mass layoffs or mass hiring), if they're really committed to making a change, a year into the adoption of a new methodology, more often than not, they're still in a "fake it 'til you make it" stage. People will be using the vocabulary/colloquialisms/etc. of the new methodology, but the actual execution will largely resemble the methodology, such as it was, prior to the introduction of the new one. That's actually what progress looks like! Slowly but surely, behaviours will start to change to more closely match the way people are talking/thinking about the new methodology, but it's going to be brutally slow. There's an old expression in the Scrum world, that if you manage to be successful without making any adaptations to Scrum, you almost certainly were successful before you adopted Scrum, and you would probably have been successful even if you had never adopted Scrum. Not that Scrum can't be helpful, but it's just so unlikely to arrive into your organization already fit for purpose. At that point, empirical analysis of the methodology is more an empirical analysis of the organization and/or the old methodology than the new methodology. So yeah, when I read someone saying that Scrum has a 'Get Out of Jail Free Card', particularly if that seems based on their anecdotal experiences with it, rather than some kind of broad survey of outcomes, that seems more reflective of their context than of Scrum. My expectation is that their context is shaping how they perceive Scrum, or any new methodology. If "Methodology X" had been adopted instead, it's quite likely there'd have been a similar perception of "Methodology X" if it had been adopted instead. Now, it's possible to read this and say I'm just reinforcing the article's notion that you can't evaluate methodologies. I'm not saying that. You can evaluate methodologies, but it's hard to construct a meaningful evaluation. You'd either need an insane amount of controls, or you'd need a broad enough sample set that organizational noise balances out enough that you can get a read on the signal. Most of us aren't in a position to do that. Even if we were to do this and we found a signal, there's enough variance from one context to another that any particular organization might observe wildly different outcomes. tl;dr: While development methodologies can have impact, they are far from the most important driver of outcomes. So yeah, a good or bad outcome is far more likely to be driven by other factors. That you must control for other factors isn't a "get out of jail" free card. It's just scientific reality.