Ask HN: Do you think Scrum is a sham?

Software quality of what is built in the scrum way seems poor as it does local optimization and doesnt focus on long term.. seems like some thing that would work for consultancies the best?

Simple Kanban seems more effective, do you feel the same way? Am I doing scrum wrong? Is scrum built to ensure that program managers / product managers have something to do?

If you are building a product with a very close partnership to the end user with a small, experienced team who share a both a common view of the world and a common definition of success then scrum can work very well. Although, ANY methodology can work well in that environment.

The further away from that ideal the less successful scrum will be. Do you have a team of mixed ability? Scrum will have trouble because you are supposed to view everyone’s opinion as equally valid (but that new grad just doesn’t know as much as the grizzled veteran and scrum doesn’t accommodate mentorship).

Are you one or two steps removed from the end user? Then you are going to have problems because scrum demands a tight feedback loop with your user so if the “product owner” needs to launch a three month “customer survey” to answer every question you have many sprints without any meaningful feedback.

The fundamental truth is you can dictate what is built, or you can dictate when you want it. You can’t do both (because any meaningful software is by definition novel).

Scrum tries to say “deliver every sprint” without being opinionated about what get’s delivered. That can work with a tight feedback loop with the end user, but invariably product managers, sales, and business strategists get involved and they all want to be able to promise Things by Dates (“we won’t hold you to the dates, honest”) and that’s where it breaks down.

All of this is before you even get into the cargo cult of points poker (the value is in identifying mismatches in shared reality, not in sizing the stories) or stand ups (which only work if you are all trying to deliver One Thing).

Finally factor in that early adopters or scrum were actively looking for alternative ways to develop software beyond the “conventional wisdom” of waterfall whereas now everyone views agile/scrum as conventional wisdom and it’s unsurprising that most people have a decidedly subpar experience.

> There is so much jargon and cruft around it; planning poker, story points, scrum master etc

Neither planning poker nor story points (nor even stories, which are a prerequeisite for planning points to be “story points”) are parts of Scrum. They are independent practices each with their own history, rationale, and associated bodies of knowledge that are frequently used within various development methodologies including Scrum.

> Software quality of what is built in the scrum way seems poor as it does local optimization and doesnt focus on long term.

“local optimization and doesn't focus on the long term” doesn't seem to be an inherent feature of Scrum particularly contrasted with “simple kanban”, which you suggest is the superior alternative.

> Simple Kanban seems more effective, do you feel the same way?

I think flow-based rather than increment-based methods are generally superior, and I am increasingly convinced that the Scrum Master and Product Owner roles defined in Scrum are counterproductive, demotivating, contrary to the Agile principle of collective ownership, and thus generally a bad idea, abd I think that while a daily checkup/plan update meeting is useful, I think most of the common ritualized use of the daily scrum (“did/doing/impediments”) is better served by a shared visual indicator, so, yeah, I tend to favor something more kanban-ish than Scrum (whether by that you mean Scrum-by-the-book or Scrum-as-commonly practiced).

> Is scrum built to ensure that program managers / product managers have something to do?

No, nor does Scrum even define roles for them. If they exist in an organization, they are outside the scope of Scrum.