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> Finally we have this self-organised, cross-functional, non-hierarchical, essentially amorphous development team. They are meant to be self organising, with no

• conatus 8y ago
  "no-one with the authority to balance the product owner and advocate for developing with higher quality" In a functional scrum team everyone on the team should be empowered to advocate this. In turn the product owner should be receptive to technical improvement because it is in the interest ultimately of the overall project success.
  • matthewmacleod 8y ago
    In a functional scrum team everyone on the team should be empowered to advocate this. In turn the product owner should be receptive to technical improvement because it is in the interest ultimately of the overall project success. Yep, I fail to understand the problem with this. A product owner who doesn't respond to pressure for technical quality is a bad product owner – end of story.
  • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    These types of replies always strike me as No True Scotsman fallacies, which are rife in Agile & Scrum. “No true Scrum team would do X.” “No functional team would disempower people...” At some point though, Agile & Scrum cannot be propped up like that. When the same failures happen again and again all across the industry, it’s time to admit that the tool facilitates that failure. The tool (Agile & Scrum) is the correlate here. Somehow it’s always showing up co-located with these problems, but we’re never honest enough to step back and admit maybe, sometimes, with enough evidence, correlation can be related to causation in this case.
    • lispm 8y ago
      A poor organization will find out how to fail in many processes. The problems are much deeper than at the scrum level.
      • conatus 8y ago
        Basically this. If the ecosystem in which scrum (or any process) is embedded is hostile then it will fail. But so will everything else, in time.
      • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        This just trades one non-falsifiable defense for another. First it’s “no true Scrum implementation would have property X.” Now it’s “any observable badness of Scrum was just ambient badness of an already bad company bleeding into Scrum.”
        • lispm 8y ago
          > no true Scrum implementation would have property X. That's not the point. Scrum does not say anything how good your organization is. Scrum won't fix these problems. Thus you can have a great Scrum setup and still fail. Of course you can have bad management and a 'true scrum implementation'. Your mistake is to assume that Scrum fixes all kinds of management practices or that 'true scrum' also means all kinds of other things, which it does not. It's also unlikely that specifically bad management practices are especially caused by Scrum - it might have some negative effects in some organizations - it might have positive effects in some other organizations. Scrum is simply not sufficient to be successful - if we want to be successful Scrum might be a good tool in a certain domain, but we also need to address the other issues/topics/practices/processes. Most of that stuff is very independent from using Scrum or not.
          • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
            What? I don't assume Scrum should or can fix bad management practices. I'm saying adding Scrum to already-bad management practices is like throwing gas on the fire. Scrum doesn't help. Also, if Scrum is only some kind of special snowflake process that only works when applied in sociologically perfect companies, well then it's useless. I'd rather use custom, ad hoc, duct-taped together management practices that get the job done even in the midst of bad corporate sociology.