A good agile developer is a skeptic

You can often read about people referring to Scrum teams as a sects. Well, all close knit groups are in the risk zone of becoming a sect. And getting to stuck to an idea can make you almost religious in conviction, as Artima Developer points to in his blog. Being a skeptic and an believer in agile methodologies I concur: you must not forget the Agile Manifesto's statement:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This means that you should never follow a methodology or a principle without the retrospect. And the retrospect is worth nothing if you're not a skeptic. If you're not willing to challenge the methodology or the principles, you will be stuck. And answering criticism of how you work with that's how you work using your chosen methodology is a no-answer unworthy of an agile developer. If you don't know why you do X, you should look in to that as soon as possible, especially if X is hindering someone or something.

I'm looking at scrum as a sketch and an idea or a concept, not a recipe to follow like a slave. If someone has a problem with the daily stand ups and the rest can't argue it's case, maybe we shouldn't do daily stand ups. If the team feel that the sprint backlog is hindering them and no one feels differently, the sprint backlog should be changed or removed. Now, I see the point in all these artifacts, but the important thing is to know why they are used, and that goes for all the team members: why should a team member take part of the daily stand up if he doesn't know the objectives of if and why should a team member use the sprint backlog if he thinks he works better without it?