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How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?

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Re: How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?

#6

Post by jVinc »

pnako wrote: post #5
monksy wrote: post #3

You can't. That's part of the intention of scrum. No deviating developers without prior permission.

Yes, and it must be stapled by the manager, senior executive vice-president and head of compliance. How very agile.

Scrum is very clear on this. The PO is in charge of the product backlog. The PO and PO only. If the business has some internal alignment she needs to go through then fine, but the development team doesn't have to care about that, which is great when it works and roles are respected.

Re: How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?

#7

Post by jVinc »

monksy wrote: post #3

You can't. That's part of the intention of scrum. No deviating developers without prior permission.

There is no mention of permission in scrum. There is no event where you discuss if people had permission to do what they did.

You might be using scrum in an organisation that is otherwise overly restrictive or has build it's own processes around how to seek permission prior to implementation but that has nothing to do with scrum.

Re: How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?

#9

Post by monksy »

jVinc wrote: post #7
monksy wrote: post #3

You can't. That's part of the intention of scrum. No deviating developers without prior permission.

There is no mention of permission in scrum. There is no event where you discuss if people had permission to do what they did. You might be using scrum in an organisation that is otherwise overly restrictive or has build it's own processes around how to seek permission prior to implementation but that has nothing to do with scrum.

What did you do yesterday? (Also their next question is somewhere arround why didn't you finish it) What are you doing today? (That sounds like scope creep) Are there any blockers? (Let me give you my unsolicited advice)

Re: How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?

#10

Post by temporallobe »

I am not really seeing the problem here, nor do I agree with the premise that scrum turns X developer into Y developer. Your success as a developer is primarily driven by your desire to succeed, but also by a combination of the team, project, and company culture. Scrum is not at fault here, because bad management, lazy team members, and a toxic work environment can make any worker in any discipline complacent, no matter which system is used. I’ve worked for 20 years in this industry and have seen various management and development methodologies used, and my conclusion is that what matters most is the attitudes of the people themselves. If you have even one toxic coworker or even worse, a toxic leader, it can change the morale of an entire team and possibly even put an entire project at risk. That’s what can turn a great developer into an average one. If you have below-average developers, scrum will do nothing to actually make them more motivated; they will probably remain average, despite appearances that they are moving tickets quickly.

Like any other system, scrum can be abused and twisted into something it was never meant to be. A project I worked on had daily scrum-style standups as well as daily, weekly, and monthly status reports; We also had Jira and our boards were closely scrutinized by every level of management and the customer. We happened to use scrum, but you couldn’t look at this and say scrum was at fault for such duplication of information and ridiculous reporting requirements.

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