
Scrum is fragile, not Agile - pplonski86
http://www.dennisweyland.net/blog/?p=43
======
wpietri
He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the
term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile
processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption.

I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable.
I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies
have other priorities than being effective, so the processes that dominate
will reflect those priorities.

On average, the first priority of managers and execs is maintaining the power
structures that make them a big deal. But true Agile processes are about
empowering teams to self-organize around serving users. Ergo, Sturgeon's Law
[2] applies here too: 90% of company software process is crap.

I think reason why Scrum in specific won out is that it combined a process
framework unthreatening to executives with the multilevel marketing scheme of
Scrum certification. Executives got to keep doing what they were doing, the
workers got a "didn't stop breathing" certificate, and coaches got paid. Win,
win, win!

[1] [http://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-
an...](http://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-
fell-in/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

~~~
brightball
Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints
become terribly destructive over time.

~~~
barrkel
Scrum is iterated waterfall. By iterating faster, inaccurate estimation is
shown up sooner. On the other hand, developers are treated like cogs in a
feature factory, munching through backlog items fed to them by product
managers.

I think it works well enough, for a few years. I don't think it's sustainable
- the blinkers of "sprints" encourage growth of tech debt because nobody has
an eye on the future and Product won't prioritize refactorings, and sprints
are too short for devs to sneak refactoring into the schedule.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Scrum is iterated waterfall.

No, it isn't. Iterated waterfall is at least as old as the first paper
discussing waterfall, but while scrum mandates interations, it doesn't mandate
much about how work is done in the iterations, and specifically does not
mandate the process steps associated with waterfall; further, it emphatically
rejects the role separations and handoffs associated with waterfall during the
iterations.

> munching through backlog items fed to them by product managers.

That's...not actually Scrum, as it implies that either the role of Product
Owner is taken by a PM outside of the Scrum Team or that that the Scrum Team
is not self-organizing, either of which is a significant (even if common)
deviation from Scrum.

> the blinkers of "sprints" encourage growth of tech debt because nobody has
> an eye on the future

Tech debt should manifest in reduced velocity which should be noticed, taken
as a signal of a process defect, and addressed in the Scrub Team’s various
inspection and process adjustment points.

OTOH, if the Scrum Team is properly cross-functional and self-organizing
instead of having a non-team-member imposed as Product Owner, then including
appropriate restarting as components of completion of relevant backlog items
shouldn't be a problem.

~~~
wpietri
What percentage of Scrum teams do you believe are "properly cross-functional
and self-organizing"? And could you point me to examples of people losing
their Scrum certifications for not living up to that standard?

~~~
dragonwriter
> What percentage of Scrum teams do you believe are "properly cross-functional
> and self-organizing"?

About the same percentage as that of “Agile” software development shops that
put people and interactions above processes and tools.

OTOH, at any place that is considering implementing either, there are decision
makers who can influence (or in the case of Scrum more than Agile,
authoritatively direct) whether or not that's the case, so for them, at least,
it's worth distinguishing between problems with Scrum as prescribed and
problems which often occur because decision-makers decided to ignore key parts
of Scrum-as-prescribed.

~~~
wpietri
Most nominally "Agile" shops are in effect doing Scrum, so I'm not sure that
answer helps your case. Either way, it sounds like we agree the "good Scrum"
shop is at best rare.

Given that, I think it's worth considering that the problem is Scrum.
Especially given that Scrum is not just a process, but an organization and an
army of "certified" people that sell services.

When something generally doesn't work for its stated purpose but keeps making
money, I think it's worth asking what its real purpose is. E.g., things like
crystals and psychics. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “Every great cause begins as a
movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

~~~
dragonwriter
> Most nominally "Agile" shops are in effect doing Scrum

No, most nominally Agile shops are also nominally doing Scrum, but _actually_
doing not-Scrum in a not-Agile context, largely due to sabotage of both core
principles of Agile and foundational elements of Scrum by management.

It doesn't matter what name and superficial ritual you put on the process if
it's all window dressing over top-down disempowering command-and-control by
persons who are neither doing the work nor experts on the work.

Which isn't to say that the Agile and Scrum bodies of work aren't part of the
problem: neither really addresses as a key point how the team effectuates
ownership of process and how interaction with management works, which means
those gaps get filled in (or rendered moot, in the first case) in ways which
compromise what those bodies of work do prescribe because.

Lean, which comes from basically the same perspective (while they don't cite
exactly the same values as expressed in the Agile Manifesto, being Lean
essentially implies being Agile and vice versa) and is a good body of
knowledge to draw from alongside Agile, is better in this regard, and so
places nominally drawing on Lean seen to be more likely to be doing what they
say, because Lean doesn't leave as much of the core vital parts without good
guidance.

------
clumsysmurf
At the company I work at, we have the following scrum anti-patterns. I wish I
knew, whether we could "do scrum right" or just move onto something simpler
(fta; priority queue)

* Daily standup, nobody wants to be at. We have multiple teams arrive, with roughly 20 people in a small room. Some people stand, some people sit. Sometimes the front-end team goes, sometimes the back-end team goes. Its limited to 15 minutes, so nobody says much of importance, and just parrots what is already on the Jira board.

* Scrum master driving process above scrum. The scrum master's role is to make sure scrum rules are adhered to. But at this company, any deviation from scrum itself poses a threat to this person's job security, so it doesn't happen. More high-level processes are not optimized because the scrum master defines everything.

* Technical debt. I see this time and time again. User Stories are supposed to be forecasts, not commitments. But the business doesn't like stories carried over, so they become commitments. At the end of each sprint, everyone rushes to get their stuff done, and hacks are implemented to meet an arbitrary deadline. Many times I want to begin my work by refactoring something to what it needs to be first, then do the actual user story. But its risky because the refactoring might take more than the allocated story points, and you get dinged. So I do the story first, and if there is time do the refactoring but it almost never happens.

* Poor product owners. During maintenance phase, we could work on cleaning up technical debt, but this value is not appreciated by business so they keep us busy with bikeshedding. One gripe I have about scrum, is there is nobody representing engineering, as the product owner represents the business.

These things combined have dragged down the happiness of the people I work
with, but we all feel imprisoned by it. I have a stack of scrum books here I
plan on reading, I figure this process isn't going away and I need to up my
game with how to play it - but I wish I could use something else, perhaps
kanban.

~~~
anon1m0us
The way I decided to play the game was like this, "I won't be attending the
Daily Standups anymore as I don't think they add value and do subtract value."

The project mgmt response was, "Attendance at standups is mandatory."

Regardless, I didn't go to anymore standups and when I got flack for that, I
stopped going to the office all together. When I got flack for that, I stopped
working all together.

Then I got fired. That solved all my scrum problems.

~~~
analog31
I got criticized for zoning out at scrum meetings. So I watched what the
managers do. They show up for the first few minutes, look alert, then leave as
if in a hurry. I started doing the same thing, and never had a problem again.

~~~
Aeolun
If you do this often enough. People will assume you are busy if you don’t show
up at all.

~~~
madmulita
Don't forget to always roll up your sleeves and carry around some papers.

~~~
alchemism
If you are in a paperless office, tapping a tablet with a stylus as you walk
confers the same office space prestige.

------
yibg
The best place I've worked at as a developer essentially had no process. It's
also the place I really saw the benefits of having good managers (or a project
manager, but here the manager took this role).

Essentially the "process" was:

\- Someone gets an idea to do something, e.g. PMs wants to add a feature.

\- The manager (maybe with the help of a dev) figures out which teams need to
be involved (e.g. dependencies).

\- Get a very rough estimate from developer. Are we talking a few days, a few
weeks or a few months?

\- Manager, PM and other teams get together to figure out priorities,
schedules and who's likely to be working on it.

\- Based on some discussions, areas of expertise etc, some number of devs gets
assigned to work on this feature.

From here the devs know what they're trying to accomplish, what the
constraints are and who to go to for questions (PM, design etc). They also
know who else from other teams they're collaborating with and they just figure
out amongst themselves how to get things done. They'll keep their managers and
the PM updated on progress and any blockers.

Every once in a while manager etc have to step in. For example if some big
that was previous unknown came up, there is a big risk, priorities need to be
adjusted etc. But for the most part things just worked really smoothly.

Sometimes we need to give estimates and really hit it (legal or security
issues, big marketing launch etc), but for the most part we were trusted to be
doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible. So none of the commits,
sprints and burn down charts BS. It's not hard to gauge develop's productivity
based on output anyways. If there was something slowing the team down, we
communicated the need to the manager and PM, and we worked on fixing it.

So for me, if you have good competent people that communicate well, you don't
really need much process.

~~~
leib
But how did you ensure that you udnerstood the requirements if you were
potentially just left to it for a few months?

At the end was there ever an instance of the client not using what you
produced because it wasnt what they wanted?

~~~
yibg
You have direct access to the PM and work closely with them. If you weren’t
clear on something you ask, if you don’t agree with something you debate it
out.

Like anything else there is no silver bullet. Sometimes you got the feature
right, other times it misses the mark.

------
fenwick67
In my very surface-level, western understanding of Chinese philosophy, Agile
seems very much like Taoism and Scrum is like Confucianism, in several ways.

The Agile Manifesto describes a set of ideals but gives no true set of
instructions to follow, to do so would not be the Agile way. More than
anything, it prescribes an attitude around which you should generally approach
things.

Scrum conversely gives rules for how things can be organized and executed in a
functional organization. It gives little room for flexibility. Any problems
you have with Scrum, the first reaction should be "how are we following the
rules wrong?".

Similarly, Tao and Agile are ideals for the individuals (and small teams),
Confucianism and Scrum are rules for getting things to work functionally
within a society/company.

~~~
ineedasername
The comparison may be very apt. After all, a key tenet of Taoism is that the
Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. It may very well be that an Agile
development process that can be fully specified and documented is not truly
Agile.

~~~
erik_seaberg
Somehow I'm reminded of "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and
uncertainty!" but I'm not sure which side it supports.

------
femto113
There's a set of practices here in Seattle that I've come to call Skragile,
which evinces the veneer of of Scrum, Kanban, and Agile, but embraces very
little of the fundamental philosophies. The most distinctive characteristics:

\- daily standups (often one per day per team so multiple per person)

\- sprint based development cycles, often with retrospectives

\- fondness for the "as an X I want to Y" story

\- story points defined in terms of developer hours or days

\- Kanban style "pick a thing to work on", even in sprints

\- burndown charts

Seems nearly inevitable that when anyone here says "we need more process"
they're looking to have more of one or more of the above. I essentially never
hear anyone in project management say anything like "we need to build more
prototypes" or "we need to streamline our deployment process" or any of the
other concepts that would actually characterize a (lower case a) agile
development process.

(edited for formatting)

~~~
zdragnar
This is pretty typical elsewhere too (midwest US as a data point).

Its popular because managers can implement it. Agile- the manifesto version-
was intended as a way to re-introduce the notion of discipline that newer
generations of programmers had lost (where previously they were engineers and
scientists who wrote code, now people who code exclusively eithout other
backgrounds).

It feels like we have come full circle to where the new generations of
programmers have delegated (or lost) all discipline to managers' Scrum
plannings.

Managers and "product owners" aren't engineers or programmers. They shouldn't
be expected to "manage" a developer's day-to-day, and yet them presiding over
sit-down-stand-up meetings and demanding points and determining deadlines and
features is precisely what it has come to. We are right back where we were
when the manifesto was drafted.

~~~
spamizbad
The irony is, when I first saw Agile/Scrum, I thought of it mostly as a tool
to provide discipline further _up_ the chain rather than down.

User stories? Oh, a neat way to keep requirements general and open-ended so we
can properly address how we're actually going to solve a user's problem.
Surely it'll prevent PMs from over-specifying requirements that lose sense of
true objectives.

2 week Sprints? Cool, estimates are hard, and now I never have to estimate
more than 10 business days worth of labor.

Retrospectives? Great idea, we can finally do proper post-mortems and
knowledge-sharing!

Scrum Masters? Wonderful, there's someone whose dedicated to running the
process and making sure we have everything we need!

What I wasn't anticipating:

User Stories? But what about critical requirements that need to be prioritized
that don't fit into "As an X I need Y"

2 Week Sprints? I now have so much technical debt a repo man is confiscating
my laptop.

Retrospectives? This is always going to be 100% about how we didn't estimate
correctly and not about far more important matters like: how these features
didn't help our users, technical knowledge-sharing, and ticking-out technical
debt.

Scrum Masters? Oh, you mean Project Managers?

~~~
zdragnar
My favorite team experience was scrum done "right". Standups were run by a
scrum master who was the most experienced engineer on the team- programming
longer than I've been alive type of guy.

Probject managers and product owners were kept at arms length in the sense
that they didn't dictate how, what or when we did what we did. They translated
the business requirements and timelines into something we could understand and
react to.

Somehow, all of that turned into two week sprints that felt sustainable... At
least until the company bought out another company, and everything went
downhill. That, however, is a story for another time.

------
ScottBurson
Managers, not understanding the difference between latency (how long each task
takes) and throughput (how much work is getting done in total), always try to
optimize for latency. The predictable result: throughput goes to hell, and
then latency goes with it.

People who actually write software understand that you have to optimize for
throughput first. Not to worry: latency won't be forgotten! But a primary
focus on throughput will result in a clean codebase, that will maximize
throughput _and_ minimize latency.

~~~
marcosdumay
The rationale is that if you minimize latency, throughput has to be maximum
too, so optimizing latency is enough.

In practice latency is the goto target for optimizing actual processes. It's
the most linked with all the risks. But software development is not an actual
process.

~~~
ScottBurson
> The rationale is that if you minimize latency, throughput has to be maximum
> too

Exactly. And it's quite wrong even without taking the growth of complexity
into account — as every engineer knows, or should know. Getting every task
done as quickly as possible requires a lot of context switching, which is
murder on throughput. When you add in the effects of complexity growth (aka
technical debt, though I think "complexity growth" is clearer) the
disadvantages of optimizing for latency become that much more serious. And the
worst part is, as the disease progresses and latency deteriorates, managers
try to cure it by applying even larger doses of the poison.

This idea that managers optimize for latency, while I optimize for throughput,
occurred to me only recently. But as I look back over the disagreements I've
had with managers through the years (including disagreements over the
usefulness of Scrum processes!), it's quite remarkable how many of them seem
to come down to this.

~~~
ako
There's pretty good theory behind the idea of minimizing latency to improve
throughput. One of the better books on this is "Managing the Design Factory",
and a followup called "The principles of product development flow".

These books are not about software development, but of product development in
general. The first one actually predates agile, published in 1997.

Core idea is that minimizing the size of the tasks is the best way to improve
productivity. Not getting it done as quickly as possible, but to decrease the
size.

Remember that product development (new, innovative, uncertainties) vs product
manufacting (repeatable), is not a new problem, and not unique to the software
industry. There's a lot to learn from product development in other industries.

Another interesting read is "The Toyota Product Development System:
Integrating People, Process And Technology" which talks about ways of making
product development predictive, and less risky.

It's interesting to see how little software is used to improve the process of
software development. Other industries use a lot of software (cad/cam, visual
modelling, testing, impact analysis) to improve efficiency and quality of
product development. Software for product development is a huge market.

------
forgotmypw
I've worked on more than 10 different Scrum teams, and have seen it done well
exactly once. When it was good, it was very good.

But we spent one entire workday (7 hours) on each sprint follow-up meeting,
and then another entire workday planning the next sprint. That is what it took
to write the stories, break them down into one-point pieces, prioritize with
the PO, pass the stories out to the devs, etc.

Most places just don't plan for enough time to do things right, and quality is
second priority, so no matter what methodology you use, you lose, because no
cared about doing it right to begin with.

~~~
gchucky
I'm on a team that started doing Scrum a few months ago, and we're still
figuring it out.

To be clear: are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so
because they spent more time on the process? Reading what you wrote, spending
two full days every two weeks to plan sounds, well, terribly dragged out. Does
it feel like the time was well spent, or was it a slog?

~~~
forgotmypw
It did not seem dragged out, it was just thorough, and reasonably un-rushed.
It was somewhat tiring, but definitely worth it.

By the end of the planning meeting, we had a clear idea of what we were going
to accomplish, and a reasonable amount of confidence that we considered all
the tasks that went into our plan.

Because when a story was, e.g. "add addresses to the clients page", it was
broken down, discussed, thought out, and agreed upon. The moments when I
discovered, oh shit, this story will actually take 10 hours longer than I had
allocated, and now I have to stay until 10PM two days this week to meet my
committment. Because our story points were approximately an hour each, and
almost every story was broken down until there were no tasks more than 3
points each, 1 or 2 preferred.

It was all thanks to our scrum-master/project manager, who had actually spent
a lot of time learning about scrum/agile/kanban/etc, read many books on it,
and most of all, was committed to doing it right.

I think our sprints were a bit longer than 2 weeks.

------
jpollock
Whenever I've used scrum, the developers set the estimate and task breakdowns.
We even had the developer _doing_ the work provide the estimate. It's not
really fair to have someone else estimate your work, it doesn't breed
commitment either. We did sanity check things - sometimes an estimate would
seem big and everyone else would ask why. The answer was either we had missed
something (typically), or (rarely) the estimator misunderstood the task and
thought it was something bigger.

At the end of each sprint/cycle we shared estimate vs actual effort, to
improve our ability to make a good estimate and set an overall velocity.

On my first Scrum/Agile project, there were complaints of overwork the first
sprint. Then I pointed out that we were the ones setting our own estimates,
setting the pace and causing our own problems.

After that, the estimates got reasonable. We stopped playing "Name that Tune"
with our estimates and the project settled down.

------
rileymat2
I am curious how much process research is being done as an industry. With
billions at stake, it seems like I would run across more studies where teams
were paid to produce the same software independently. But virtually none of
the methodologies I read are backed by much rigorous experimentation.

Maybe it exists and I am just not reading the correct articles.

~~~
mdorazio
You're 100% right that this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be
tested in various settings to figure out what an optimal setup looks like for
different problems. Unfortunately, I had a hell of a time finding actual
comparative data with real metrics [1][2]. Pretty sad that 90% of the
"research" available is either snake oil or mostly useless comparisons of
methodology.

[1]
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85d0/00404206914501d26e0bb4...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85d0/00404206914501d26e0bb46f079832ef0ce2.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261047173_Agile_and...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261047173_Agile_and_Wellbeing_
--_Stress_Empowerment_and_Performance_in_Scrum_and_Kanban_Teams)

------
AngeloAnolin
There have been a lot of software development methodology but one thing that's
been overlooked a lot is the competence of the people doing the execution of
the project. I am talking not just about the developers / engineers who are
building the product but everyone across the pipeline - product owners,
business stakeholders, process specialists, business analysts, project
managers and just about everyone else.

People attribute failure to the process because it is demeaning to put the
blame on people when _established best practices_ can receive the finger
pointing.

Stop the notion of being nice to the lack of skills of people. Hiding behind
being nice does not resolve the issue but rather propagates it. Fix the issue
by providing the grounds for people to learn and become productive.

~~~
mempko
Yes! One thing I don't see people mention is that Scrum requires that everyone
on a team to be competent. It's for teams that are already great that want to
be even greater. It's not for teams with inexperience and incompetence. My
guess is many people are afraid of scrum because it may out them as
incompetent.

~~~
perl4ever
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but "many people are afraid of scrum
because it may out them as incompetent" sounds like the cliche of "X cannot
fail, it can only _be_ failed"

~~~
mempko
Yes, it does sound like a cliche. However, the point of scrum is to find
problems that get in the way. Through the process, it's clear who knows what
they are doing and who doesn't.

------
stevage
The position may be right, but it's so badly argued. Arguments he uses in
support:

\- the dictionary definition of "agile" \- how many times the word "agile"
appears in the Scrum Guide \- how "lengthy" the Scrum Guide "seems" \- that
Scrum is a process, so does not "sound Agile".

Ugh. How did this reach #1 on HN?

~~~
akeck
I think because people are frustrated. My read of the conversation is that
there's a lot of latent resentment towards modern Agile and Scrum practices.

------
RandyRanderson
A long time ago, ppl figured out that no one process was right for every
organization, project, technology, etc. They created process frameworks
(things used to create a process) and they saw that they were good.

Then ppl came along and said that they were "too complicated" we need
something Agile! In actual fact, those ppl didn't understand the process
frameworks and just created a specific instance of one and they wondered why
it didn't work for all projects, organizations, technologies, etc. And then
they said those processes are "too simple" \- what can we do? "Maybe we should
create a way of generating a process?", they then said. And so it went...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solutions_Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solutions_Framework)

------
patothon
Are we still talking about these dated concepts?

Agile is a mindset.

Understand the mindset, absorb it, make it yours, and build the process that's
working for you based on that mindset.

Stop complaining about Scrum, it's just a tool, and tools deprecate.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Yep, I've never been in a team where the process was not a regular topic of
debate. Once it stops being a topic of debate, it actually just means people
are no longer adapting. I prefer a good dose of pragmatism here. Changing the
rules all the time is very draining on team morale. Similarly not adapting to
obvious process issues is equally demoralizing.

Since everyone is doing, or claims to be doing, agile, the whole notion is
completely meaningless. Unless they are actively advertising to be doing some
form of waterfall, you can safely assume there is some notion of iterations
involved.

What matters more these days is whether the team is mature enough to have
continuous deployment without process bureaucracy. Deployment fear is a good
sign the process sucks. If you have a need for human gatekeepers, something is
wrong with the test automation. Deploying often and with confidence is a good
sign you are dealing with a smoothly running team.

------
orangeshark
I don't really have that much industry experience but have been reading a lot
about development processes and practices. It seems there just isn't one
development process that will solve all your problems and allow you always
create successful software. To me it seems you just need to find what works
for your team and continuously work on improving on it. What might work today,
probably won't work for your team tomorrow so you need to always look at how
can you improve your process.

ACM recently had a series of webinars[0] by Ivar Jacobson on Essence[1].
Essence was kind of confusing at first, but it is essentially a language to
describe practices from the different processes. The idea is that you can
build up a library of the various practices in your company and allow teams to
pick their own and evolve their process by swapping out practices that just
don't work out. Essence seems like an interesting idea, especially if it
allows teams to create a development process that fits them.

[0]:
[https://www.sigsoft.org/resources/webinars.html](https://www.sigsoft.org/resources/webinars.html)

[1]: [https://www.ivarjacobson.com/services/what-
essence](https://www.ivarjacobson.com/services/what-essence)

~~~
Const-me
I have decades of industry experience and I mostly agree.

> find what works for your team

For the combination of team and project. Different software projects need to
take very different tradeoffs in how they managed. Use scrum in aerospace for
flight control, and people will die. Use scrum for system software, and you'll
have hard time delivering quality and performance, system software often
requires non-trivial amount of engineering. Implement NASA's best practices
when working on videogame or web app, and you'll blow budget.

This article is from 2002 but still good:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-
worlds/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/)

------
marsrover
Scrum is micromanagement. I think it’s as simple as that.

~~~
verinus
no this is completely and entirely wrong.

on the contrary: you have a PO in charge of communication and priorization of
features and a dev team in charge of developing- no manager on top...at least
in theory...

------
thunderbong
From all the comments, I see that arguments are there both ways. I also
understand that we should follow a process that bets suits the business. I
would really like to know how we could set up an Agile process provided that
is what is required.

Is there anywhere this would be documented to explain - a. How an agile
process in initiated? b. How an agile process is maintained?

I have been part of a team with mis-applied agile processes -

1\. Requirements change frequently. And not due to users asking for them. More
like the Project Managers asking for more configurablity.

2\. Requirements are not thought through. Even the simplest cases.

3\. Changes don't get vetted by users. Instead, we go through another round of
requirements!

4\. Every once in a while requirements (and teams) get re-organized, re-
planned which puts all the developers off.

I have also been part of a team which focussed on deliveries. This team has
been able to write tests and iterate over requirements fast. The satisfaction
level of all the developers in the team as well as the project owners were
high.

1\. Requirements were phased.

2\. Whatever was required to be done in each phase was thought through as far
as possible. Anything that wasn't clear or was more complex to think out was
sent back to the project owners / users for clarity.

3\. Code and tests get written. Phase delivered.

Although this process was extremely successful, I don't know if I would call
this Agile.

------
innomatics
I agree that Scrum is fragile but not that it isn't agile.

It's agile up to the point that it is broken, which happens often due to it's
fragility. That it is easily broken is an unfortunate but unavoidable
consequence of its complexity, and common misunderstandings/misuses.

Scrum is complex because large software projects (large as in number of
people, budget and expected velocity) are never simple to manage. Scrum is
complex because correct usage can not be read from a book nor gained from a
qualification - it requires experienced judgement to pick the optimal usage
and apply it to a team and project.

Nothing can beat the effectiveness and efficiency of a single strong developer
working on a stream of well considered backlog items. That is engineer
nirvana! However many projects simply require more velocity than one person
can manage. From here, there is a whole spectrum of processes that should be
chosen depending on resources and needs. From my experience, full scrum kicks
in once you have four or five engineers on the same system.

Product management is a key point of failure in Scrum, true also with other
processes. But it's felt so much more when an entire team grinds to a halt and
an iteration fails.

If Scrum doesn't feel agile then you are doing something wrong. This is
exactly the question the team should be asking itself at retrospectives
(doesn't need to be three questions!). What's changing in your process sprint
to sprint? Scrum masters are there to facilitate incremental process changes
driven by team members, not a system that doesn't result in agile software
delivery.

------
martin_drapeau
The author had really bad experiences. SCRUM is super agile when done right.
Change can be introduced during sprint transitions (reviews, retrospectives
and planning) - never in the middle of a sprint. Doing so will kill moral and
break the rhythm of the dev team.

SCRUM is meant to be owned by the developers - not management. Shame on
companies that hijack and impose such process.

SCRUM gives dev teams rhythm with sprints. Allows them to deliver mini
releases of functional software in 2-week increments (could be 1 to 4 weeks
too - lenght should be decided during planning). The goal of a sprint is to be
decided by the developer and doesn't have to be about the software. Can be
about learning, improving as a team or helping team members to grow. Here are
a few examples I've seen: \- Measure 5 metrics in Kibana \- Marie-Pier leads
sprint review demo \- Try self-merging PR's and measure the results \- No more
loose ends Of course, in parallel the team builds and delivers an increment of
functional software.

The planning, review and retro rituals are paramount. SCRUM can only work well
if those are well planned and executed. The retrospective is particularly
important to allow the team to improve themselves. Its an opportunity to
change their own process (i.e. change the definition of done).

Contrary to wide belief, story points are not part of SCRUM. Its a mechanism
that can be used to gauge the size of work - it should be up to the dev team
to decide whether to use them or not. Again dev teams should own that process
- should not be imposed by management.

These lessons I've learned in the past two years thanks to an awesome SCRUM
evangelist we've hired. I'm proud to say its changed our lives for the better.

------
h0l0cube
Relevant: [https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-
agile.html](https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html)

------
Osiris
I'm doing Kanban right now at my job and, I have to tell you, it's so
_liberating_.

I hate artificial deadlines (i.e., sprints). Kanban let's you focus on the
work without all the process distractions.

------
tmin
In my current team, we post our daily status on a slack channel: what we do
yesterday and we are going to do today. We try to keep to one or two points.
We have remote people so that works out well. Standup is optional. On Monday
meetings, each person tell one thing that we are going to do. Sometimes it is
two things but the point is to focus.

~~~
gremlinsinc
This is the way it should be.

Meetings should only be between business / leads to get scope onto canvas.

If I'm blocked I'll seek out the person who can most help me. I can easily
find 5-10 minutes to write out a summary, but on my terms when I'm not in
coding mode.

Now, I'm freelancing, likely to be team lead for the company assuming they get
financing - and I keep taking notes and reading ways to organize better. We
have a ton of work to do, it's a financial mobile app that has 0 tests on the
api (I'm single-handedly running the API development Laravel + vue (for some
web views)). Money is tight so I'm the only dev on web side and we have 1 ios
dev.

The hope is to be full-time at this by Christmas w/ a 6 figure salary (my
first +6 figures).

------
ravenstine
Scrum truly does end up being "Waterfall" most of the time, in my experience.
I think this is largely because teams or management inevitably get bored with
projects and end up shifting priorities regardless.

From what I've seen, projects almost always start out in a
requirements/analysis phase because management, stakeholders, etc., need the
reassurance. I've yet to see any public-facing project of meaningful size
start out releasing _actual_ MVPs as opposed to "big bang" releases.

Design often happens first because engineers don't want to(and sometimes
can't) begin coding away and then receive designs that are either counter to
their existing work or are unworkable; management usually sides with design
because, well, _it looks cool_.

Engineers eventually get coding, but non-automated testing doesn't really
occur until later because it can be impractical to have people testing
unfinished software. Then there's alpha testing, users break the software,
engineers fix bugs, A/B testing of different versions of features, then beta
testing, where users again _break the software_ and the engineers fix more
bugs.

The project continues to drag on because the first 80% of a project is always
the easiest part, and management is always hesitant to release "unfinished"
software.

Inevitably, there's a _big bang_ release, by which point management has
already gotten bored and has dreamt up other "big ideas" for the team to focus
on, at which point the project is, for all intents and purposes, placed into
_maintenance limbo_ where bugs are fixed, junior developers place their awful
code, and a new "feature" is added now and then to satisfy the marketing
department.

Senior developers rationalize the waterfall-like nature of the project, so
they opt for "continuous integration", but all that ends up translating to is
maintenance limbo without versioning.

The _actual_ next version of the software doesn't get built until after most
if not all the original team left, and the original software became "legacy"
enough that bugs keep popping up and the new engineers don't want to touch the
old code. Management eventually gives in, for better or worse.

Am I wrong? This is what I've seen happen to the vast majority of software
projects, all under companies that were either Scrum, Agile, or pretend
"Agile". Maybe I've just had bad luck.

I wish more teams could pick and choose what methodologies to use for their
purposes, rather than buy into MLM garbage.

------
smrtinsert
Said it a million times before - I deal with way more process and paperwork
using scrum than I ever did with waterfall. I'm not saying waterfall was an
answer, but at the places I worked on it, it did a better job of staying out
of my way.

------
cuillevel3
The SCRUM guide is not long, it's 19 pages in a large font. If I remember
correctly it does not even mention a lot of the processes which make up SCRUM
for many teams.

However the article is not wrong, it's too easy to make SCRUM all about the
process, without changing anything about interactions, developer empowerment
and feedback cycles.

I think the SCRUM doesn't do a good job of putting limits on what is still
agile SCRUM and what is not. Maybe because it's written in such a friendly
language.

------
bitwize
The aim of Scrum, and other methodologies tagged Agile, is -- near as I can
tell -- to emulate a good programmer with a team of mediocre programmers. Not
that all developers working on Agile teams are mediocre programmers, only that
the business wants to achieve good-programmer results while still being able
to leverage the wider talent pool and lower risk and cost offered by hiring
mediocre programmers, so it tends to adopt formalized processes designed to
work well with them in the hopes that following the process will make them
achieve good results. The process is a formalization of the relationship a
good programmer has with their client, which is known to produce good results;
therefore, the process must also produce good results by definition (and any
failure to produce good results can immediately be blamed on lack of adherence
to the process).

Unfortunately there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and when you emulate
you necessarily incur overhead, which can be prohibitively large if you're
emulating something powerful -- plus, if you have actual good programmers on
your team, they will either quit or start emulating mediocre programmers to
remain compatible with your mediocre-programmer process. Either way, you lose
the benefits of having them.

------
hendershot
The problem often is that scrum (or any iterative process) fails when it's not
paired with good XP engineering practices. There's constant learning and
change on the product side, which drives constant learning and change on the
implementation side, the code needs to be constantly refactored to best handle
the changes.

TDD/yagni/refactoring allows you to keep your code base nimble. I can't
imagine doing an iterative process by slamming features in one after another
without refactoring the code as you go to handle what "you now know", or not
having good test coverage to support the changes you need to make.

Refactoring also shouldn't be something the PO is aware of, it's not a story,
or a 2 month break from feature development. It's part of the job as each
story is implemented. Yes, sometimes you don't notice a good way of doing
something until some time passes and that area of the code becomes a bigger
refactor than usual, just have to deal with it as soon as possible.

------
jeandejean
That's a bit of an easy critic of Scrum on its literal sense rather than a
critic on what doesn't work or isn't agile or is fragile. I've seen Scrum
badly and imperfectly implemented everywhere I've been, yet I think this is
preferable as having a strict interpretation of its principles and processes.
I don't care actually if Scrum is intrinsically not agile (or Agile): I think
what matters and is actually what's happening is people adopting Scrum with
agility.

It has good principles like backlog, sprint and daily meeting. If teams only
pick one of those or anything else and that it help them, great! By the way
holding solely Scrum accountable for failures is narrowing down the analysis
to only one part of all things that can go wrong and have nothing to do with
Scrum. That's a cognitive biases concentrate.

------
taeric
Reading the comments on this post are truly sad. The amount of "me too"
juxtaposed with "actually, this isn't a true scotsman" are truly mind
boggling.

I wish there was a prescriptive way to successfully make and deliver software.
I have seen very little evidence that there is.

------
mtaksrud
Although I have remained sceptical of Scrum, I do find it a bit strange that
many of the negative comments about Scum here seems to be related to not doing
Scrum (The old, you are not doing Scrum properly). All the talk about
managers, and being told what to do in a sprint etc. None of that sounds like
Scrum to me. Isn’t the whole idea of Scrum about self organising teams (?),
independent of management etc. All you have is a Scrum Master to facilitate
the process, and a Product Owner (part of the team) who prioritises the
backlog because that role has an understanding of what is needed to solve the
problem at hand (in terms of functionality needed).

------
oisjdfoiwej
Where this stuff really fails (IMO) is when execs throw together a half-baked
structure around a project, and throw minimally qualified human resources and
a few consultancy firms at it. Knowing that "shit rolls downhill", it's always
the developers who end up sweeping up the mess working endless hours trying to
make deadlines, ensuring everyone further up the hill looks good to their
bosses, while praying that their project doesn't get terminated.

In my experience this seems to be an issue unique to enormous corporations.
When I used to work at small / medium-sized companies this never happened.

------
acd
I think that longer term strategic planning is missing from the Agile Scrum
manifesto.

Agree with the Software development priority queue part being good thing.

Long term planning was in the waterfall process which does not work that great
either since it tends to over focus on planning.

How do you find a good balance between Agile and Waterfall?

I think it can also be different what process works well if you are a startup
and need to deliver a MVP minimum viable product as soon as possible. Compared
a bit to if you are a long term enterprise company and need to maintain your
code base over time. Ie dealing with technical debt from short term solutions
vs long term stable.

~~~
jon-wood
Strategic planning doesn’t belong in a process designed to provide constant
iteration on a two week basis. In successful organisations I’ve worked with
strategic planning is one of the things that feeds into the backlog of
features to be developed, and runs in parallel to development.

------
Pulletwee12549
In my experience, I was lucky to apply Scrum and Agile correctly so now I
understand them and can distinguish between them. In my current job, there are
no chances to replicate those conditions and I do not expect Scrum to succeed
(although we use a lot of Scrum terms to define what we do).

I think one should have experienced a successful scrum project before being
able to criticise it.

Scrum is a tool: you may be Agile without using Scrum or you may find easier
to be Agile using Scrum. Doing Scrum does not make you Agile. Scrum is hard
and implementing it takes different skills than those proven by individuals
who can write code.

------
mmcnl
Honestly, the comments on this thread baffle me. Endless complaining about
scrum and everyone who is not a developer is apparently clueless about
software. Is this an adequate reflection of reality? This doesn't seem like a
very mature attitude. Scrum is a simple framework with only three roles, the
development team being one of them - so if the process fails you are (partly)
to blame for it yourself as well. Take responsibility!

What's the better alternative? What have you been doing to make things better?
The answers to these questions as much more interesting than endless
complaining.

------
hliyan
I searched the entirety of the Scrum Guide
([https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-
guide.html](https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html)) and could not find
a single reference to "agile". And a quick Google search about the origins of
Scrum reveals:

 _In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become Scrum at his
company, Advanced Development Methods; while Jeff Sutherland, John
Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel
Corporation, referring to it using the single word Scrum._

------
trickstra
> In other words, it is a very specific and well-defined process. This does
> not sound agile and it also does not sound Agile (remember: “Individuals and
> interactions over processes and tools”)

This is a many times debunked myth about the Agile manifesto. Even the authors
themselves explained that "Individuals and interactions over processes and
tools" does not mean and shouldn't be taken as "no processes".

Also, agile is not about moving quickly but about being able to easily change
direction any time, therefore dealing better with changing environment.

------
sgt101
Scrum is a communication contract between customers / stakeholders, managers
and dev teams. It is a poor cure for social and managerial dysfunction, but it
is a cure.

Scrum is a problem when it is mandated and imposed on functional organisations
that do better and more fluid communication. This is often done as a way of
flexing corporate power and does huge damage.

A key problem is that we do not have ways of auditing and measuring the
performance of software teams no matter what methods they are using - until
then this is all anecdote.

~~~
arsenico
> A key problem is that we do not have ways of auditing and measuring the
> performance of software teams no matter what methods they are using - until
> then this is all anecdote.

Of course we have ways of doing that - one is the code quality, another one is
historical performance on agility.

------
devtul
I wonder what happened to so many developers that turned them so jaded and
cynical towards scrum and project management. So far I've dealt with the good
and bad of scrum with a good pinch of horrendous PMs in the mix, but I still
came out of it with a positive view of the framework. It is hard to run it
somewhat smooth and takes lots of motivated people to accomplish[1], but the
result had a positive impact on my day-to-day work.

1 - Some people said that this can be a failing of scrum and I 100% agree.

------
solatic
Scrum only works if you need sprints, and you only need sprints if you have
non-engineering stakeholders whose mandatory approval can only be attained in
one meeting per sprint length.

Some large orgs really work like that, where the approval of one ham-fisted
iron-gripped executive is deemed more important than hundreds of thousands of
dollars of engineering talent going to waste. I don't think this is very
effective but alright then.

Everybody else should just be using Kanban boards with periodic review.

------
jnwatson
Reading all the comments out there, there is some atrocious stuff people call
Scrum. I'm not even a huge Scrum fan, but it folks seem to criticize what
people do in the name of Scrum instead of what is actually in the process.

The TLDR of Scrum is simple: (product) management gets to set the priority of
things every 2 or 3 weeks. After that, we see what got done and check to see
if the priorities are still the same.

If the priorities are wrong, don't blame Scrum, blame management. If tech debt
is increasing, don't blame Scrum, blame management.

There's no magic bullet to determine what is important, and certainly Scrum
Master training won't help an incompetent manager a competent one.

~~~
foopod
I don't think I have ever seen it done as badly as some of these comments.
Scrum itself is a very light and quite flexible framework, half of the
complaints here aren't even Scrum related. User stories aren't part of Scrum,
neither are story points or burndown charts.

Of all the people complaining about Scrum it doesn't sound like any of them
have read the Scrum Guide. Symptoms of Scrum are not managers pressuring
people at stand ups, squeezing 4 weeks of work into 2 and having a "team" of
20 people. These are symptoms of poor leadership.

------
ravenstine
Has anyone ever tested whether Scrum or Agile _actually_ work better than
"Waterfall" for software development?

~~~
ddebernardy
Agile works fine, if you ignore the Scrum hocus pocus. Stick to basic project
management principles (work on one project at the time, wrap things up before
moving on to the next project, set aside a bit of time for unrelated work)
with the stakeholder put at the center of what you're up to.

The problem with Scrum is that it's usually (always?) implemented as
serialized waterfall projects with completely arbitrary looking deadlines
(i.e. the sprint's length). All too often things get sort of done but not done
quite as well as everybody would be happy with. It's stressful for everyone
involved and, insofar as I've seen it used, it makes accumulating technical
debt even more likely than more traditional waterfall projects.

------
wbronitsky
I’m quite amazed by the lack of substance in this article. It takes potshots
at certain ideas and processes, without managing to explain these potshots, or
even coherently explain the ideas and processes. It is a flimsy opinion piece
with no substance, but a clickbait title so everyone ran here to comment.

What a virtuous cycle

------
hestefisk
“To me it seems that one very important part of high quality software
development is to maintain a simple priority queue of tasks. The weight is a
combination of the value a task provides for the customer / developers and the
estimated effort to implement this task.”

A.k.a. common sense :)

------
danpalmer
Agile – the only word in the English language that inverses its meaning when
capitalised.

------
myspy
Scrums point for me is to prepare your development time. Talk about the
issues, prepare the issues, ask the client, make a mock-up and then implement
in code.

Usually it's hack together something and see if it sticks, which is awful.

------
edsykes
just to offset a bit about scrum being bad: I have used SCRUM over 15 years to
run teams and it worked. Most of the problems I am hearing on here are culture
problems and no process can fix that. Regarding planning, a day per scrum is
normal - sometimes longer, you have to use your judgement to determine when to
move from design to implementation. Also, heavy use of spiking stories to
learn enough to create the right design is important

~~~
sime2009
Can you explain a little bit more about your "spiking stories" and how you use
them?

------
sadness2
The best of agile can be summed up in one piece of advice: "Create short
feedback loops". Nail that and you can't go too far wrong.

------
mcv
> _" We are simply caught in a rat race and not able to make a short break in
> order to look at and learn from all the things that happened around us,
> maybe even before our time."_

But isn't that exactly what Scrum wants you to do? After every sprint, you
spend some time to reflect, look at how you're working, look at the bigger
picture, etc.

Scrum is by no means perfect; it's a tool, not the infallible silver bullet
the author wants it to be. If you misuse the tool, you're still going to get
wrong results, but that's the same with every other method.

The real question is: is there a better way to do it that can easily and
reliably be implemented by large corporations? I think the popularity of Scrum
is probably due to it being more successful than what was used before.

It might not be truly Agile, but for large corporations, being truly Agile may
be a bit much to ask. They need reliability and reproduceability, and that
means they're always going to need some focus on processes and procedures, and
can't always rely on people who might leave or have something happen to them.
Not that Scrum is always a good fit for those processes and procedures, but it
does help make it appealing for large companies, and at least it puts a good
part of the process in the hands of the people who will be using it.

tl;dr: Scrum is not perfect, but what is?

------
makach
uh oh, is this the one article that will make people go "A-HA, told you so?"
#confirmation-bias

and, I never saw so much interpretation of what something should be as with
Agile.

not everyone is entitled to say or mean something, that includes myself and
this post.

------
a-dub
"ahh-gee-lay! must be italian!"

------
mlthoughts2018
Agile itself is pretty bad too. “Responding to change over sticking to the
plan” is pretty much the single biggest reason why I see projects fail.

~~~
jrochkind1
I think the key motivation of agile is the recognition that the plan made in
advance is often _not right_.

If completing "the plan" is seen as success, then of course sticking to the
plan is the best way to success. But if maximizing business/user value is the
success, then "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." (I don't like
"the enemy" concept, but this is a famous quote that gets across the concept).

And I think the reason why "agile" fails is because many actors in many
organizations find they are effectively rewarded for "completing the plan"
regardless of business/user value, indeed.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
This is just not accurate. The types of changes thrown in after early
requirements gathering are most often coming from product managers and
executives, not from customers and not driven by genuine feedback or budget
constraints, etc.

“Sticking to the plan” does not mean rigidly enforcing zero changes, but
rather means keeping a commitment to the general scope and direction that was
mapped out. Compromises should require extraordinary hard evidence before
being accepted.

This is really why Agile as a general set of guidelines is so easy to subvert
and ends up being a misused tool in most every situation where Agile is
deployed (Scrum of otherwise).

Project management guidelines need to start out by specifying a way that
quality is strictly disallowed from being subverted by competing interests
that lobby for changing the plan.

If a set of software project management guidelines doesn’t start out with an
unchallengeable quality-above-all-else mandate that creates policy barriers to
the natural entropy of different interests trying to lobby for why their
preferred change has to be made, then it’s doomed to just get politically
subverted.

Doesn’t matter if it’s Agile, Waterfall, extreme programming, whatever.

“Sticking to the plan” in the sense of setting up preemptive, high-cost
barriers to anti-quality modifications to what was agreed is _the_ thing.

------
known
Nothing can replace Will and Wisdom

------
diminoten
This is very light on specifics? What, exactly, _is_ fragile about Scrum?
Where does it break down, and what can I do to prevent it from breaking down?

Without that info, this just feels like buzzword bingo, a la "What should I
write about to stir the pot today?"

------
lugg
Reminds me of this goto conference talk from one of the original Agile
developers "pragmatic" Dave Thomas.

Speaks a lot bout what agile truly is and how scrum is a very large mismatch.

[https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M](https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M)

------
yegor256a
You may find this very much relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOAMNOso46g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOAMNOso46g)

------
mempko
To think of scrum as a process is wrong. It's actually an organizational
pattern language. The idea is that social interactions are a complex system
and there are patterns of interactions which, from experience, seem to work in
certain contexts.

[http://www.scrumabok.org/](http://www.scrumabok.org/)

It's not even software specific. Which is actually a strength.

Example, one common misconception is the daily standup is a status meeting. In
fact you are supposed to replan in standup, it's a tiny planner. Not sure how
you can call the ability to pivot every day not agile.

EDIT: Unpopular option, software quality is poor and it has nothing to do with
scrum.

~~~
patothon
No.

Agile is a subset of TPS (toyota production system)/Lean applied to software.

~~~
mempko
And scrum? TPS is explicitly an influence on scrum.

~~~
patothon
Scrum is just an instance of the agile manifesto. TPS/Lean > Agile > Scrum.

Kanban for example is another instance of the agile manifesto.

~~~
mempko
Scrum existed before the agile manifesto. It's probability more accurate to
say Agile is a mix of those things.

