One of the sad things happening in the agile world at the moment is the attempt to commercialise the various methodologies, especially Scrum.

I saw a google ad appear on my blog for a company called Sprint IT. They have a bunch of tools and services that supposedly help in the scrum process when, in reality, all you actually need is a pen and paper or, at most, an excel spreadsheet (which is what I use).

These guys even have the following on their front page

"Interactions and people over processes and tools."

In order to realize agile software development process in your company or project we provide the tools, trainings and consulting in order to help you reaching your goals.

The quote is from the agile manifesto, but the company statement directly below it seems to subvert that immediately and favour the tools and processes over the interactions and people. I mean, really, when does a "standardised scrum checklist" do anything but encourage process over interactions?

If the effort to commercialise scrum and other agile methods continues like this it will be very hard to differentiate "commercial agile" from waterfall based methods. It will also be very hard to clearly explain to the masses the difference between "commercial agile" and "open source agile" (for want of a better term).

My suggestion is you boycott the tool vendors and stick to the basics. Hopefully a lack of commercial success will stop this sort of nonsense continuing.