"How does scrum address this issue?"

I hear this pretty often. The most difficult thing for people to understand is the answer that I give them...

"Scrum doesn't address problems, it only uncovers them... Scrum has done it's part, now it's your turn."

Think about this for a second.

Who do you need to make software in your organization?

as an example, let's say we need:

A business analyst/tech writer to write documentation, a tester to work with the business to validate agreements have been met, a programmer to write the code and unit tests, a business person to make decisions about what to make, and a user or user proxy to ask questions about the functionality.

so i got a ba, programmer, tester, business, and user and i put them on the team and the business guy writes out a list of functionality by priority. The team selects what they think they can do in 30 days. They start working on the highest priority item.

Day 1: scrum meeting:

programmer says "i can't write the UI functionality because no one has told me what fields of data we need to have, i'm impeded"

scrum master says "Who can help programmer do this?"

business person says "I can do this"

scrum master says "ok you two are going to get together and resolve this problem"

That i think is pretty understandable from most everyone in the scrum community right? I have a programming tasks i can't do, something is in my way, the team has someone who can resolve the problem, the team fixes it.

Here's another example:

programmer, "I cannot do this part because we're interfacing with a vendor application and they won't settle on what interfaces to use, we cannot get agreement"

scrum master, "who can help with this?"

<silence>

scrum master, "Let's get together after this scrum meeting and decide how we're going to solve this problem".

the team gets together and makes a decision... they can:

Get a vendor resource on the team (if they're really lucky)

cancel the sprint

remove the backlog item from the sprint (lower it's priority below everything on the sprint)

... or maybe they come up with something more innovative (i hate answering questions like these for the team because it limits their creativity).

To me, this is the mechanics of how scrum surfaces problems and how a team could possibly address them.