Only through true faith in scrum shall our software be finished and our income be guaranteed! The holy signs, only visible to the scrum manager and his close disciples, hidden deep within the sacred burn-down chart shall predict the future! We must put our faith in them, for only they can tell us if our release schedule harvest will bring us the sweet nector of short testing phases, or the hardships of many bugfix releases.

Expelled shall be the unbelievers whose heretic notions of waterfall design taunt the mighty scrum shamans! Those who do not follow the ways of scrum and refuse to partake in expanding our blessed JIRA board will be of no use to us righteous developers!

Now chant with us, followers of our sacred ideology, for we must never forget our essential guiding principles!

Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release! Initiate, plan, implement, review, release!

Any common behaviour of any group of people tends to sound like a cult if you look at it from a distance and sprinkle a bit of religious wording in between. It’s a fun creative writing exercise. If you leave out the cult angle, it can actually be a good philosophical mechanism to think about how peculiar our “normal” behaviour is. Every culture has their own little unspoken rituals, expectations, and assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema is the high-effort take on this, documenting American life from the perspective of an outside explorer as if Americans are some kind of uncontacted tribe.

Scrum is one of those processes people have come up with for very good reasons to solve real problems, but have been ossified by documentation, books, and business processes, turning it into something that’s half “good business practices that solve our work flow in a meaningful way” and half “we do this because it’s part of the steps we’ve been taught in college/during my scrum certification and because it’s The Rules”.