Scrum Sucks
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Scrum Sucks
1–10 of 298 posts
Re: Scrum Sucks
#2yes...yes it does
Re: Scrum Sucks
#3Scrum is adequate when you have a release management is simple and low risk.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#4I've seen it suck even worse when trying to manage large X-Ops organizations. Something about the work, let's call it DevOps for the sake of simplicity, simply does not seem to lend itself well to the scrum methodology. Often priorities will shift rapidly even during the course of 1 working day, issues are vaguely defined and poorly scoped by nature (AZ1 cannot reach AZ2, plz fix ASAP), and the work is extraordinarily hard to measure complexity/effort (a one line config change can take weeks of investigation and touch tons of services).
I've seen plenty of people try though, to varying degrees of unsuccess. A kanban style system has always worked better for me personally.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#5It's even worse when they try to apply it to hardware.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#6[deleted]
Re: Scrum Sucks
#7I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting.
I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that I must be exaggerating or lying. He then fell back to a lecture about how Scrum is an industry standard and how it's more efficient than alternatives.
Really opened my eyes to the disconnect between Scrum mythology and Scrum in practice. The amount of time lost to doing Scrum things was so out of control that some people had fewer than 3-4 hours per day to actually work.
Of course, the Scrum proponents will rush in and tell me that we were doing it wrong or that it's not truly Scrum if it's helping more than hurting, but these people were highly trained in the ways of Scrum and Agile and pointed to various Scrum and Agile books and certifications to defend their ways.
OTOH, I have been on very small teams where Scrum was implemented with low overhead, but those teams were filled with efficient people who would have been productive without formal methodologies either way.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#8Scrum is a decent framework for teaching business stakeholders how to work in an agile fashion, and to force some developers to always have releasable software.
But at a certain point people get so attached to the process (or teaching process) that they get scared to take the training wheels off. So yes, Scrum sucks.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#9Yeah, it sucks just like democracy does... Pity we don't have anything better.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#10One comment - the article mentions that Waterfall was basically the only approach used prior to agile. This is false. In some industries waterfall was used, but in others software was designed and driven incrementally just as with core agile. The work I did in fixed income brokerages in the early 90s was largely ad hoc agile.