Scrum Sucks

In my opinion, retrospectives give the power to the team to improve their own process. Without self-organizing teams, you have no agile. So without retrospectives, you have no agile. So I always wonder if and what they do during these retrospectives.

In agile you're supposed to know what's going into your sprint, and each ticket should meet your "definition of ready". Teams shouldn't need someone on hand because they should already have refined and unblocked issues before the ticket was added to the sprint.

Whatever it is you're doing it isn't agile.

In 2022 + 2023 i conducted about > 220 insight interviews with Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Product Owners for a product i am currently developing.

There was a VERY VERY clear pattern:

1. almost all teams where using Scrum or Kanban or some mixture of it 2. less then 1% of teams actually had a product vision, product goals or a sprint goals 3. nobody was actually doing "inspect&adapt"

My assumption #1: it is not the framework or the people, the failure is within the system.

My assumption #2: every company is different, a company is a complex system and many many factors contribute to the outcomes, nothing is clearly black or white. Any framework needs to be adopted with the core concepts in place; with Scrum the core concepts are usually not implemented and therefore Scrum fails.

() Site note: training standards of people seems to be very low; a lot of Sscrum Masters and even "Agile Coaches" cannot explain even the basic concepts of Scrum and Kanban.

Example: What is the purpose of Daily Standup? How can you assess the quality of Standup? How can you improve the Standup?

So what is wrong with the system? - company does not have a product strategy, only tasks like "develop feature X" - company does not have strategy management processes in place - there is NO collection of meaningful data regarding process health and performance and specially Scrum Master work against creating transparency (out of fear)

What is the solution? Implementation of a framework without robust performance monitoring is pointless and failure is certain.

The issue? It seems that Scrum Masters push the most against performance monitoring out of fear to become transparent. Also, being transparent in an company with low (psychological) safety might be professional suicide.

People forget that Scrum was developed by observing successful (senior) teams, but if they don´t understand how value and waste it generated it is meaningless to follow any framework.

Example: Having a lot of meetings does not generate the waste, it is only the symptom. The root causes of many meetings are inefficient management and communication structures. In order to avoid the waste you don´t need to remove the meetings, but first resolve the underlaying issue(s) and then the need for the meetings disappear. Removing the wasteful meetings might actually create more waste/harm, as the company might perform even more badly afterwards.

So yes, individual developers might get more working hours but generate less value over time. The purpose is not to maximize the working hours of developers, but to maximize the value generated by the team. The assumption that "more development hours = more value generated" assumes that alignment with product goals, teamwork and cross-functional collaboration is in place.

Isn't 5 points less than 2 days then?

For the record, in my team we don't use story points or measure velocity. I just had a frustrating discussion with a peer team that didn't plan an important task because "its 5 points and does not fit into a sprint".

The main point of stand-up/daily scrum is to set up collaborations and coordination. It's where you invite pairs, inform POs of blockers and discoveries that will lead to longer timelines etc.

If you're doing all that anyway, keep going and don't worry about stand-up.