I have delivered successfully projects using Scrum, but we were fortunate that our Scrum Master was well trained and a senior engineer. Our CTO also let us figure things out, and helped us when we were blocked. He was genuinely concerned with the team having a balanced workload, ensured we deliver user value and our software was of high quality. Story points were not used as performance metrics but a tool to help provide stakeholders with some estimation, but only when our velocity became stable. Overall, our process was light-weight, we spent most of our time coding, and we pushed hard to deliver value to the user. If we fell short, we learned from it, no blame, just learned.
Scrum is a cancer
71–80 of 486 posts
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I too despise Scrum, the causation could be runming the other way: the Bosses that have a better team could be more likely to let them run without major pressure.
No love for Scrum but this is the more likely explanation. A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value. Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.
Top talent does not exist.
This problem exists at big tech and startup, in companies that spend fractional multipliers of the average salary on engineers as well as those who pay poorly.
In this environment, if your solution is "hire better people', you can't- there isn't any
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I too despise Scrum, the causation could be runming the other way: the Bosses that have a better team could be more likely to let them run without major pressure.
No love for Scrum but this is the more likely explanation. A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value. Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.
If CEO can hire a 100$ scrum master to save a 1000$ failing team, it's much cheaper than hiring 2000$ successful team. That's probably what they're thinking
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#74I work for a web dev firm in the infrastructure team.
They are trying to apply scrum and agile to us. It is not working.
I've been told ot to work on anything without a ticket. Outages have gone up.
It's a disaster.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#75So what is an alternative process?
Kanban is one alernative[1]
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#76Any good alternatives?
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#77I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…
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Re: Scrum is a cancer
#78I'm not sure if a process can be a cancer. Instead, an institution that uses processes, Scrum included, to hide their ineffectiveness and inefficiency is.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#79I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…
> I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them.
The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value.
You can easily find 40 mid to low level coders and a half-dozen people who know how to run a scrum team. Maybe even some of the coders know how to do that for extra savings.
Also in the latter way you can easily have a turnover in the team without any major hassles, you can always find mid-tier coders.
But if one of the 6 highly experienced ones leaves, good luck finding a new one quickly.
A shitty car analogy: You can get a more efficient and faster car if it's 100% custom made. But if something breaks you need to manufacture the parts. Or you could make do with a less efficient and slower car, built out of highly standardised off the shelf parts.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#80Removing the OP energy of "enrage to engage", I think there's a room for a more nuanced position.
It's a pity that we do not have more people doing systematic research related with Scrum/Agile practices and it's advantages, Regarding on outcomes, in comparison with RUP, empirically we know that it worked better based on economic results + adoption/spread + people empathetic to use it in a corporate environment.
However, after 22 years of Agile/Scrum we do not know in a systematic and in a scientific researched way the second order (side effects) of Scrum as a management tool, and which kinds of incentives it creates. We know empirically based in a small amount samples.