Regarding documentation, my team tends to choose parts of a project to document in detail before the project begins. These are usually around requirements and dependencies that have a low likelihood of changing. But throughout the project, the product is the gospel and the docs evolve towards that until delivery.
I suppose if you did a pre-planning phase like ours but comprehensively documented your entire product and then delivered exactly to those docs 8 months later without input, you'd not be doing agile for sure.
When I say protection, I don't mean protection from the customer. The scrum process protects the team by requiring the ICs on the dev team to choose the user stories or work items which will come into the sprint. This prevents management from committing the team to work they themselves do not think can be accomplished. This meeting should leave a written record which is shield but also the acccountability for the dev team.
I suppose if you did a pre-planning phase like ours but comprehensively documented your entire product and then delivered exactly to those docs 8 months later without input, you'd not be doing agile for sure.
When I say protection, I don't mean protection from the customer. The scrum process protects the team by requiring the ICs on the dev team to choose the user stories or work items which will come into the sprint. This prevents management from committing the team to work they themselves do not think can be accomplished. This meeting should leave a written record which is shield but also the acccountability for the dev team.