I think some organisations have deeper problems [than developer communication] which SCRUM and Agile are simply not equipped to cope with.

Here’s one example:

* Moving functionality from a legacy^2 to legacy (mainframe to client-server)

* Target system groaning under 15 years of neglect, developer outsourcing, technical debt and band-aids. Source system simply untouched for nearly 20 years.

* Source and target systems inherently un- unit testable

* Mediocre developers with no intrinsic sense of craftsmanship nor any desire to acquire some

* Developers with no experience of legacy codebase so completely unqualified to estimate cost of stories

* Culture of fear reinforced by performance reviews, stack ranking and PIPs

* Locked down QA systems and silo’d resources

Any one of these would be a project killer but my last employer suffered from all of them in the same project and showed no inclination to address any of them because they were deemed to be out of scope. But it was totally fine to tie up 10 people for 15 minutes every day to enable the PM to derive a magical velocity curve to feed back to the stakeholders so that the company could demonstrate how effective this SCRUM process was going to be.