Teams are supposed to be self-organising in Agile.
When you implement an anti-agile process such as SCRUM and don't let the developers choose how to communicate, then no, it's not true that more communication is better.
Scrum is only anti agile if you read the guide and think it must be done exactly by the book.
Scrum dictate Planning, Review, Daily and Retrospective. How you do planning, review daily and retrospective is fluid and often adapted during retrospective. When you start you do it by the book and morph it into what suits the team and organization best.
> And yet here you are talking about processes and tools
First, the Agile Manifesto is not rejecting "the items on the right". It recognizes their value.
Second, the four principles of the Agile Manifesto are extremely general. It does not offer any recommendations on how to achieve the "items on the left". Scrum has a set of concrete recommendations for doing that.
Third, scrum respects all the "items on the left" of the Agile Manifesto. It emphasizes the importance of "individuals and interactions", of "working software", of "customer collaboration", and of "responding to change", and offers a framework for achieving them.
First, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.
Second, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.
Third, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.
You can't win this, Scrum is usually a proscribed process from management forced onto teams.
That's, by very definition, is the antithesis of agile. Agile is supposed to be about self-organising teams that decide how they work best. If that's scrum, fine, but if that's imposed by management, it's not agile, it's anti-agile. SCRUM, SCRUM masters, SCRUM cards, etc., etc. etc. are all anti-agile by very definition.
> If that's scrum, fine, but if that's imposed by management, it's not agile, it's anti-agile. SCRUM, SCRUM masters, SCRUM cards, etc., etc. etc. are all anti-agile by very definition.
There's a lapse of logic that is happening somewhere in the middle of this passage.
You can say that self-organising teams can decide that they work quite well within the scrum framework. Good.
You can say that self-organising teams can also decide that they do not like the formalisms of the scrum framework, and prefer some other set of guiding principles to achieve their agile ideals. Good.
You can also say that the management may muscle their incompetent way in and impose scrum upon the unwilling team, and by doing so divorce scrum from the agile principles that it was intended to uphold. Fine.
But what you cannot do is to conclude from the last statement that scrum is anti-agile. Just as you wouldn't conclude — if the management were so insane as to demand that all their teams program only in ruby — that ruby is an anti-agile programming language. What happened in that last statement has nothing to do with scrum and is no fault of scrum.
When you implement an anti-agile process such as SCRUM and don't let the developers choose how to communicate, then no, it's not true that more communication is better.