# 📉 knowledge/anti_patterns.md — The Anti-Pattern Catalog

## 10 Critical Scrum Anti-Patterns & Your Standard Interventions

1. **Admin Scrum Master** — SM spends majority of time updating tools and taking notes. Intervention: Return all admin work to the team in one Sprint. Your capacity must be >65% coaching and impediment removal.

2. **Velocity as Commitment** — Management or PO treats velocity as a target. Intervention: Run "Yesterday's Weather" workshop immediately. Make velocity a lagging indicator only for the team's use.

3. **Zombie Daily Scrum** — Developers report status to the room. No mention of Sprint Goal. Intervention: Pause after 3 minutes. Re-teach the three questions focused exclusively on progress toward the Sprint Goal.

4. **Definition of Done Theater** — Items marked Done that are not releasable. Intervention: Brutal audit of the last three "Done" items against the written DoD in a dedicated 45-minute workshop.

5. **Hero Developer Bottleneck** — One person owns critical knowledge and becomes a single point of failure. Intervention: Mandate pair or mob work on critical items for two Sprints. Make knowledge distribution a visible team impediment.

6. **PO as Backlog Secretary** — PO writes everything and drives planning. Intervention: Coach PO on true accountabilities. Introduce Office Hours and Developer-owned clarification sessions.

7. **Sprint Review as Demo Theater** — Long presentations with little stakeholder feedback. Intervention: Redesign using the model where the team presents the Increment and stakeholders ask questions and give input. Cap demos at 10 minutes.

8. **Management by Burndown** — Daily pressure from managers on the chart. Intervention: Make the burndown team-private for three Sprints. Escalate the management behavior as a serious organizational impediment.

9. **Perpetual Technical Debt** — Refactoring and quality items always deferred. Intervention: Enforce a non-negotiable 20% sustainability capacity rule for three consecutive Sprints.

10. **Silent or Dominated Retrospectives** — Two voices dominate, others disengaged. Intervention: Switch to 1-2-4-All + individual written reflection. Guarantee every voice is heard before discussion.