Ask HN: Do you think Scrum is a sham?

Totally agree. It's just a starting point, and it's not the only model. And agree that it's more helpful for those who are more junior. But I tend to think: prevalence is some measure of efficacy. It exists because it tends to help. And it's always easier to pick nits, than it is to find the better solution.

Then again, maybe I'm just a fuddy duddy with fondness for realtime interaction. On some level, code reviews and slack chats are all you "need".

There was one company I worked at where they went into Scrum with both feet. Sponsored it at senior management level, did offsite training for developers and product managers and accepted that there would be a productivity hit for six months while they made the transition. The outcome was not increased productivity but better visibility of the development pipeline, and to a certain extent better software quality and more reliable delivery. I’ve not seen any other company willing to invest this much beyond a couple of in house training sessions and then telling the engineer a to “do scrum” while the business continues to ride roughshod over any kind of engineering planning. That said, if you were willing to put that much effort baselining your staff on any process you’d probably get good results, but such matters are typically an afterthought to the running of the business.

Scrum as a concept is great - at it's best it cuts through all the noise, gets the proper stake holders to communicate quickly and clearly, aligns everyone at the right levels, and of course allows for quick movements with large teams.

However it takes a level of commitment and often breaks down if you're not active in implementing it. The standup is a perfect example - stakeholders shouldn't be part of it and it shouldn't go into strategy or deeper discussions. Everyone knows that, and understands why that's helpful, yet both of those rules are constantly violated. A good scrum master (and you need one because it's impossible to stick to the rules without someone who feels empowered to enforce them) will keep things on topic, and I remember at one company one scrum master kicking out the stake holder from the standup multiple times. At most companies the power difference is too large to do that.

The jargon and emphasis on processes makes it too easy to focus on the surface level of scrum rather than the intention behind it. If it were presented as a flexible set of processes that you can customize to your team and project I think it would be far more successful.

And when it comes to Kanban, it really depends on the project. If you're working in a factory setting (like making assets from a list) or if you have a stable product and you're adding orthogonal features, Kanban is ideal and scrum doesn't work. If you're working in a space with unclear or developing requirements and some amount of R&D then scrum is a good fit. Scrum can make large teams move quicker but everyone needs to be on board with WHY it works, instead of HOW (which is typically how it's presented).

Ultimately though there is no one-size fits all approach. What you want is as dumb a system as is possible given the complexity of the requirements and communication.

It's like a religion. You have a simple gospel, but religious nuts turn it into a faith-based dogma. If you don't get results, it's because you're not following the rituals well enough. You get the idea.

In practice, I think it's one of those things where you should follow the rules for a while, until you can tell where it makes sense to break them. If you half-ass the implementation, you end up doing the same things as before. If you overdo it, the process stops serving you, and you start serving the process.

I do appreciate daily standups and retrospectives, but only if they're well-run. Otherwise people attend it like the Simpsons attend mass.

Personally, I prefer Kanban for its lack of arbitrary divisions and estimations. It doesn't encourage basing solid deadlines on guesstimations, and allows for on-the-fly priority changes. It requires a lot less discipline, as your only job is to keep the backlog sorted.

Scrum is like Myers-Briggs and all the other personality tests that they have. It is all 100% bs, but it makes the HR people pretend like they useful and pretend that they are using some kind of metrics, and for the developers of them to make money. But they are all just pseudoscience. (Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.)

A lot of people here are saying it is a religion, and a lot of people are saying that it is great if done right. The people who say it is religion are correct. The analogy is that religion supposedly, if done "right", will make someone a better person. But meanwhile, people cheat, steal, lie, commit adultery, murder, rape in any or all of these combinations. Religion is not based in reality nor does it help, and the same with scrum/agile.

Religion and scrum are just a money-maker for the people selling their voodoo (pastors and priests and scrum classes) and for the manager who implement scrum, they do it to pad their resume for the next job.

And as someone else noted, it is a way for people who don't have needed skills to get a job.

I used scrum one time. Boy was it the worst. Well, the actual worst was when management made us as an entire company watch The Secret movie. But that only happened one time. For scrum, management wants that to be continuous. Basically, scrum, Myers-Briggs/personality tests, and The Secret are the exact same bs. Exactly the same.