3 ms·

I'm a designer and my experience with small scrum teams has more or less been the same - a lot of the issues are handled by developers who are given some agency

I'm a designer and my experience with small scrum teams has more or less been the same - a lot of the issues are handled by developers who are given some agency to self-manage and who are half-decent at doing so. I've only worked in one environment that was true scrum, and I don't know if it was the process or the organization — but it felt so overly boxed-in. The last point has been the biggest one for me. Across multiple organizations working in the scrum process I've occasionally felt like just getting some time to talk to developers for future exploratory work is like pulling teeth because the scrum process relies so heavily on tangible tasks. I think that's a time management thing that has to be established with teams ahead of time — like "hey 80% of your week are these tasks, but you have 20% set aside for research/discussion'

blub 10y ago
One can do this 80%/20% split. Not sure if it's mentioned in some official guide or it developed through trial and error. Usually the 20% is reserved for bug fixing tasks which can't be estimated and therefore can't be included in the Scrum framework. One of my projects has a "technical backlog" which is actually just a Jira task with multiple subtasks which gets dragged from sprint to sprint. As you can imagine this doesn't work so great from a process/tool perspective, but it gets the job done (i.e. Major refactorings can be and have been performed). The thing with Scrum is that a lot depends on the PO and SM. If they're open minded and experienced you can get something decent. If they're dogmatic and pray at the altar of Jira, prepare for suffering.