"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single developer in possession of a good project, must be in sear hate of Scrum".
Scrum sucks. The Zeitgeist (am I using this right??) shifted from "is it bad?" to "why is it so soo bad?". And there're no accepted viable alternatives.
Agile, whatever that may be (cue Prince Charles), is not enough.
I like the ideas in the Agile Manifesto but those are just that: ideas. I get that for managers, that need to justify development costs, that manifesto is meaningless. Wishful thinking. I get it.
So Scrum swooped in and saved the day as a way to get workers to commit to deadlines and track those. This is obviously important.
It also shorten the dev and deploy cycles from months and years of waterfall to weeks. This is all nice and dandy. Calling it a sprint however it sneakily introduces mental stress. A time pressure. And pressure can become counter-productive.
Scrum make a concession though: it allows developers to estimate themselves. Yes, themselves. Not the tasks. Because the senior can do that in 1 day but junior over there needs 5.
Managers fail to grasp how hard is to get back into a coding state of mind (flow) after meetings. It can take hours. Most of the time it ruins the day.
At least, that's what I tell myself. Cue Seinfeld "It's not a lie if you believe in it".
Anyway, you might do something but it's not as productive as before that interruption.
And Scrum is meeting heavy. This carries appeal to managers, by giving them a feeling that they are in the loop. Which they should. Because they are the ones calming the customer down when things go sideways.
Agile is all about ad-hoc interactions ("Individuals and interactions"). Scrum on the other hand, establishes processes, cadences, cerimonies, strangely named roles and resposibilities. Opaque ways to track progress.
What problem does "complexity points" solve? The only metric that matters is time. Sure, complexity can be understood to combine time with an element of uncertainty but that translates to a multiplying factor of... time. A sprint is a fixed amount of time.
Also, Scrum, which is older than Agile, jumped into the Agile bangwagon, got a restart and promises to be cool and flexible and whatnot to get the devs onboard. But it really isn't.
It's the most anti-Agile thing ever. It's processes and tools. And companies gobbled it. Because there's no viable alternative.
There are 5 ceremonies, 3 of them are a waste of time and only one (a weekly meeting, combining task status and planning) is truly essential.
Sprint Planning: Needed
Should be done every week or every cycle.
Daily Scrum: Optional
Most of time people just say "I did this yesterday and I'll continue on it today". Why. Even. Bother?!
But it acts as a daily reminder to devs if they are moving along or not.
Demo: Waste
Don't wait for the sprint to be over to show something.
Retrospective: Waste
Don't wait for the sprint to be over to say something. Just say it when you can. Then expand it on the weekly meeting, if need be.
The rest of the time it's people trying to come up with something clever to write on a postit. "This went well. This went wrong." The potential improvements are rarely followed up.
Backlog Refinement / Grooming: Waste
Superfulous, it's part of planning. No need for a separate meeting.
I'm not alone. I'm collecting here articles that share my long distaste for it.
Yet Another Post On Scrum, But Different
Andrew is very much against Scrum except in one instance where it looks it did its job. But not how you think:
I worked at one place in the mid-2000s that decided they needed a new process—it took more than a year and, when released, had 15 stages with meetings, documents, and sign-offs—and that was before any code was written, which was simply the last step. The point was IT did not want to write any more code, so the process was designed to ensure that!
(Bold is mine)
Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion
Scrum was invented to function in hostile environments. It's a contract between hard-pushing managers and developers needing time to think and explore.
Scrum is the Symptom, not the Problem
This article points out that by not having devs on receiveing end of the fruits of their labour, they got reduced to punch card workers.
37signals has an interesting approach. They have 6 weeks cycles followed by a 2 week cool-off period. In the 6 weeks they ship features. In the 2 weeks they polish what was done or play with new stuff.
This appeals to me because it looks like 37 signals understands the sharp difference between thinking and designing a thing and implementing that thing. The first requires time, playfulness and zero mental pressure.
This operating model only works if you trust your employees to be driven. Which in large companies doesn't happen and that's another story.
Made with some <3 not a lot