Scrum is a cancer

As usual, the truth is somewhere in between. To say it is cancer is to exaggregate to say the least. But it is certainly no miracle pill either. Like most things, it works best in moderation. If you apply it keeping in mind the agile manifesto, it is not too bad. But if you apply it like a rulebook, it will not be efficient.

As an example, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". A standup is interaction between individuals. I believe it was invented to get away from the formality of heading to a meeting room and waste time with a long agenda. Instead, short and concise, stand up around the desks just where you work. Short, efficient, concise.

However, now it may have outlived itself in many teams. We work more remote, have other tools than 15 years ago. So if it doesn't work, don't do it. But if you don't know what to do, you can use Scrum as inspiration, and take it from there. There are certainly worse ways, because Scrum was not born from nothing. It was a reaction to a worse way of working.

In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :)

However, the management insisted that we adopt Scrum and get a Scrum Master to help us.

I objected to this and listed all of the problems I could see if Scrum was introduced: losing dev creativity and incentive, tickets taking exactly one sprint to complete instead of doing them at leisurely pace, the mistranslation coming from having one extra layer of communication (Scrum Master handling the client now).

The management response was: "that is not real Scrum, you had bad experiences because you weren't doing it right previously".

After three months, the progress slowed to a crawl, star dev abandoned ship, and customers started complaining for the first time.

Now I will just wait for someone to tell me that this wasn't real Scrum either, because we were supposed to have Product Owner talk to the client instead of Scrum Master :)

I don’t mind scrum, specifically the daily stand up. In an old job a couple non-contributors became obvious. And so has been my work ethic. I benefit from that because I’m naturally the kind of person to get things done. Despite my good feelings about it, I also see how often it’s used as a) an excuse to micromanage and b) a mechanism to feed leadership’s need for attention. I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but I’m inclined to think people that get into managerial positions are more social and that seems to come with an intrinsic need to be seen, recognized, and given some form of public accolades (like everyone laughing at thier funny jokes). And while I like the accountability of stand ups, you’re going to get my PRs anyway and your agile tickets/cards are getting moved to done whether I’m in a meeting or not. I think overall it’s a bit of a waste of time for me. That’s just my personal opinion though. Maybe I’m wrong, feel free to give feedback. I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

> devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings.

I think that's key. My experience is that I have often told my managers that "I don't need this meeting personally, so unless somebody else needs me in this meeting, I am losing my time".

Do you know what the managers usually answered? "I disagree, I think this meeting is useful for you. We are having this meeting to help you developers".

No wonder I don't respect my managers then, and now I happily waste my time in their meetings.

My team does soft-agile. Month long sprints and minimal meetings. We treat it less like a rigid structure everyone must conform to and more of a way to organize backlog and delegate. It has worked very well for us, however we are a small and fairly siloed team and our stakeholders are highly technical people who consume our services internally. we get the leeway to self govern properly.