“What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race? Only someone who runs very short distances. But we’re programmers, we’re smarter than runners. We know how to fix that problem, we just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards, and call it a new sprint!”
The Scrum Master is supposed to be part of the team, constantly helping with the Sprint, whether that's getting clarification for you, or pushing back on unrealistic expectations, or getting more resources, or whatever. Sprint was a bad choice of terms. It shouldn't have been related to races at all. If anything, it should be more like walking. It's about figuring out what pace is sustainable for your particular team, and sticking to that pace. Not driving anyone too hard, but delivering value (i.e. working software features and updates) at regular intervals. If a feature is too big to deliver in a single increment of time (Sprint), then it should be broken down into multiple features that build upon one another to eventually be the whole thing.
Yes, sure, all of that. But also, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss are looking at velocity and continually asking for more. They've got dashboards for it. Managers have to answer for why their team's velocity is different from another manager's team. Et cetera.
You can say "don't do that that's not how it works" until you're blue in the face, and it will still happen.
That's the critical failure of Scrum: it's one giant managerial dark pattern that's full of enticements to abuse it. Those enticements are constant. The exhortations to not do it that way are buried in the fine print somewhere, and the only reminders about them are coming from disgruntled individual contributors, probably from lower-performing teams, whose opinion is therefore suspect. The managerial opinion is probably that they should stop whining and make the deadline already.
I keep wishing we could instead have an agile framework that works with human nature instead of fighting against it.
“What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race? Only someone who runs very short distances. But we’re programmers, we’re smarter than runners. We know how to fix that problem, we just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards, and call it a new sprint!”
https://youtu.be/liUiRfN9NzQ?si=CRkbMokVLXLIdF42