Carrying over tasks to the next sprint shouldn't be a big deal, but it's frequently viewed as some sort of team failure that needs to explained to (bad) managem

Carrying over tasks to the next sprint shouldn't be a big deal, but it's frequently viewed as some sort of team failure that needs to explained to (bad) management. The more levels up in the organization that your progress is reported, the more motivation there is for management to distance themselves from perceived failure. It is my belief that this whole Agile morass is caused by programmers naively trying to be helpful and allowing themselves to be measured in increasingly insane ways like "points per sprint" and thus treated like mindless cogs in a machine. There are plenty of shops where I assume that Agile is working well, but that is most likely a function of management having a respectful relationship with the workforce. In that situation, darn near anything could work.