which might not be a bad thing if the traditional way of managing people hasn’t really turned out to be very succesful

“but if the product manager keeps bumping on you every five minutes with a new requirement, none of those not gonna help you get sustainable progress, and that type of problems are what scrum comes to solve.”

XP actually does cover that as well… Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained and James Shore’s The Art Of Agile Development cover this pretty good, but if you don’t have those books near you, you can check out the following link:
http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/iterationplanning.html

and particularly the following statement:
“If the iteration has too much then the customer must choose user stories to be put off until a later iteration (snow plowing).”

Scrum might have a better wording for this, but essentially it doesn’t really say anything more on this topic than XP does

From a company point of view, i think that adopting scrum first is a bigger step in the right direction than adopting any development methodology. Even if at first, you are practicing a mini (failing) waterfall. The reason for that, and i’m sure you will agree, is that changing the set of mind of managers is by far harder than changing a developer’s one. That, ofcurse, is true only if the organization is a learning one, and not one that lets failures move it completly off track.

The thing is, Scrum helps up see actual problems that can be addressed, while pure XP does not. For example, you can be the best agile developer in the world, you might practice TDD, can pair program with your dog, unit test with notepad and understand what the hell quicknet is supposed to do , but if the product manager keeps bumping on you every five minutes with a new requirement, none of those not gonna help you get sustainable progress, and that type of problems are what scrum comes to solve.

By the way, if your organization’s DNA is already tuned to that, I.E. good interactions, product managers knowing their limits, responsible developers, good colaboration etc, there is not point in implementing Scrum. If it ain’t broken, dont fix it.

and that’s the whole point… because it’s out of scope, a lot of people who simply jump on Scrum because it’s ‘popular’ don’t really spend enough time on establishing some practices that you _need_ when developing software. Scrum might be a general project management methodology, but i don’t think it’s too far-fetched to claim that we’ve got about 40 years of history in this industry to back up the claim that software project management is _very_ different than any other kind of project management. And as such, it needs to be dealt with differently than other types of projects.

XP is not just about technical practices btw… it covers a lot about handling people, team interactions, etc…

The way you should look at it is that XP and Scrum are complementing each other, not contradicting. Scrum handles the people, XP the technology, which leads me to this:

“You can easily become a certified Scrum master while you might not know anything about real-world software development. ”
In an ideal world, that would be an axiom. Scrum master is a problem solver and coordinator, and it’s got nothing to do with technology. In fact, you are probably doing yourself good if someone from HR holds this position. What you are refering to, are team leaders.