Why I'm done with Scrum
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Why I'm done with Scrum
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Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#2The author is right that, with scrum you end up focusing more on process and not delivery.
There are nice things about scrum, but I think scrum followers are too doctrinaire. It has some well-defined practices and is associated with that agile "manifesto" that you are compelled to buy into if you adopt scrum. Being doctrinaire about anything is guaranteed to distance you from reality - you give project managers a weapon to coerce you into worrying about how to break down your work into a velocity and stories and tasks. Any time you enforce a process like that, you are disengaging yourself from the reality of having to ship something.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#3FTA: Scrum forces iterations, forces feedback, forces smaller iterations. These are all good things, which I loved about Scrum.
And yet the author spends most of the article denying that these aspects of scrum are useful at all. Planning sessions are "highly inefficient," a "quick meeting between the architect and the developer" is better. What if someone else has an important piece of information that the dev and the architect don't? Maybe another dev on the team has done something similar in the past, and could have warned that the estimate was low? He won't be in that meeting, to avoid being "bored to tears" with a story he isn't working on.
So how do you know if Scrum isn’t right for you? If it’s hard. If it’s easy, then it will work for you.
Obviously, if something is hard, there can't be any possible benefit to it. It's so much easier to get rid of all that process stuff and just churn out code as fast as you can. What could possibly go wrong?
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#4When I took over development of a extremely dysfunctional engeering team at an established startup with 100 people, the first thing I did (after watching for a bit to learn) was put in scrum. It worked. And it worked really, really well.
2 years later, it didn't work anymore. The team had matured, the organization itself had adapted to the leaner processes and mindset and, in time, the actual scrum process was too much. It was time to change again...
And that is something I think most agile advocates don't realize. Agile should be viewed as an organizational tool that has prescripted and prescribed rules that work in general, but maybe don't work in the specific. It is great if you need something forceful with books or documentation in the beginning, but in time, the organization should mature to the point where agile/scrum/whatever is actually too much.
One last thought. I highly recommend people look at agile for the times when you need a drop in process....but there is absolutely no subsitute for hiring quality people capable of making good decisions. Agile will get more out of bad developers, IMO, but having nothing and good developers you trust is always going to be more productive.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#5The author is right that, with scrum you end up focusing more on process and not delivery. There are nice things about scrum, but I think scrum followers are too doctrinaire. It has some well-defined practices and is associated with that agile "manifesto" that you are compelled to buy into if you adopt scrum. Being doctrinaire about anything is guaranteed to distance you from reality - you give project managers a wea…
Scrum is focused almost exclusively on delivery. Every sprint, you should be delivering working features. It's not that hard: every sprint, you commit to a set of stories to finish before the next sprint. Every day you meet briefly to tell everyone how you're progressing and to air out any impediments. That's about it. To me, scrum is stripping process down to the bare minimum you need to be effective.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#6The effectiveness of scrum really depends on the team size. The larger the team, the more bureaucracy is needed to manage it.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#7Actually what the author describes is a natural path of evolution for that team. Scrum (as a process) contains the possibility of changing the scrum rules themselves - although it is strongly recommended one does that only after they get experienced (e.g. they actually manage to get shippable product each iteration).
When the focus is on the process itself and not on delivery there is something rotten in Amsterdam.
Scrum can be a micro-manager's dream (think of the visibility on who is doing what at almost hourly level) - case in which one can end up with focus on the process not on result.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#8When I took over development of a extremely dysfunctional engeering team at an established startup with 100 people, the first thing I did (after watching for a bit to learn) was put in scrum. It worked. And it worked really, really well. 2 years later, it didn't work anymore. The team had matured, the organization itself had adapted to the leaner processes and mindset and, in time, the actual scrum process was too mu…
I fully agree with your post. But do mind sharing what process you changed to then? Did it and does it still work?
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#9The effectiveness of scrum really depends on the team size. The larger the team, the more bureaucracy is needed to manage it.
True. My last project started each day with 2 hours of scrum.
Re: Why I'm done with Scrum
#10The effectiveness of scrum really depends on the team size. The larger the team, the more bureaucracy is needed to manage it.
The larger the team, the more overhead is needed, no matter what system you are using. The real problem is that scrum doesn't scale as efficiently as more structured management systems, so the overhead grows much faster than in most other systems as team size increases.
ADDED: Conversely, with small teams, the overhead of more formal methods doesn't scale down; that is where less structured methods like scrum are most efficient.