Scrum actually addresses this. It's called a burn down chart. Every day, the team estimates how much work in the current sprint needs to be done (expressed in some unit). An easy way to do this is to sum the estimates of the tasks that haven't been started and to add to this the partials of the tasks in progress. Estimates on tasks may be adjusted. New tasks (but no new user stories) may be added. Tasks may even disappear. At the end of the sprint, the team looks back. It will also look at the burn-down chart. If it doesn't look "normal", you're supposed to adjust your way of working. Note also that the burn-down chart estimates miles to destination, and specifically not miles run over the sea. (the latter is too trivial to measure, it's the average number of work units/per day/per person x length of sprint so far (in days) x number of team members). But I bet you know all of this.
“we’ll meet for exactly fifteen minutes, then we’re going to spend the rest of the day cutting metal, because cutting metal is what we do!”
I fail to see the point of this remark. If you think that scrum advocates to have a 15 minute meeting at the beginning of the day, and no communication (and just code) for the rest of the day, you're mistaken.
Perhaps the “scrap rate” is the actual metric that we should be infatuating about. And we might be able to obtain such a metric right from our version-control system logs. Look at the total “surface area” of a source-file that gets changed over time. Particularly observe when a large chunk of code is first added, then either replaced or extensively modified a short time later. If there is a defect-tracking system, try to correlate this “source-code volatility metric” with those defects. Do the same thing with the activity that is being generated by the “scrums.”
Wrong on different points. First of all, bits aren't a precious commodity. Code is cheap. It doesn't involve tons of rock and dirt to be moved and crushed to extract a few fragments of ore. A small error doesn't mean a days work is scrapped and we'll have to start all over again. Even code that is written, tested, and then discarded has value: we have learned something (this feature isn't "working" - where "working" typically means "making money for the company").

Once again, I want to remind the reader I'm not advocating scrum. But I think it's being misrepresented, and I don't think the "scrap metal" analogy is valid.

In reply to Re: "Bah! Scrumbug!" (Lessons from the scrap-bin) by JavaFan
in thread "Bah! Scrumbug!" (Lessons from the scrap-bin) by locked_user sundialsvc4

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