
Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die in a Fire (2014) - professorplumb
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-scrum-should-basically-just-die-in.html
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abawany
Thank you for writing this. There is nothing in the world that has sucked more
joy out of my life and made me question my continued existence as a software
developer than complying with the mindless tedium of Scrum. From the ditto-
heads harping on about velocity calculations to mindless unit test coverage
fanatics to the needy psychotics who demand the daily stand-up, it has
succeeded in vacuuming the joy out of the art of software development from my
perspective. In contrast, the shops where software development was measured in
terms of effective working software and high-quality releases were joyful
places to be and made me realize that it is not software development that is
broken but the processes that are intended to "fix" it.

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Randgalt
[http://programming-motherfucker.com](http://programming-motherfucker.com)

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bmm6o
Great, another anti-Scrum rant!

As I've said before, defense of agile and Scrum can easily get into "no true
Scotsman" territory, with tedious back-and-forths about whether you are really
following the philosophy and if your processes were just more pure you would
see the light. Fortunately, this essay neatly cuts off that debate with "I
have literally never seen Planning Poker performed in a way which fails to
undermine this goal." This is an argument that the ideals of Scrum are hard to
achieve, or that managing people to get them to buy into a new process is
difficult; it says nothing about the success (or lack thereof) that would
result if you were able to follow the methodology.

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vannevar
Translation: I'm a rock star engineer, and I don't need anyone telling me how
to communicate or estimate my work. If you hire nothing but rock star
engineers, you can just trust them to build great software. I'm going to write
a future blog post about how to hire nothing but rock star engineers.

For anyone who wants to try that strategy, good luck. I think you'll find that
if you actually do scrum (rather than all the aberrations the author
describes), you'll find you can do pretty well even without a team of nothing
but rock stars.

~~~
vannevar
Ok, he said a bit more than that. But most of it was directed at the same
straw men you find in the typical anti-agile rant ("Scrum makes you meet in
parking lots! And only the managers get to sit down! And nobody bothers to see
if the products work, they only look at velocity!"), none of which has
anything to do with scrum and everything to do with incompetent management,
which regrettably, along with global warming, scrum can't fix. The rant opens
with an observation that group decision-making is heavily influenced by social
hierarchy in the workplace, another observation that, while accurate, is
always true as long as 1) you're working in a team and 2) that team is made up
of human beings.

The one useful observation it makes is that you don't really need F2F
meetings, something that has not escaped the notice of the thousands of scrum
teams around the world that include remote members. If anyone wasn't already
aware of it, at least they got something. The rest pretty much sums up to the
comment I made above.

