I've been giving this some thought recently. Ultimately I blame Scrum, it is so poorly aligned with sustainable software engineering and so widely open to inte

I've been giving this some thought recently. Ultimately I blame Scrum, it is so poorly aligned with sustainable software engineering and so widely open to interpretation that its no wonder that every project seems to inevitably end in big rewrites. Scrum gives all the godly power to a product owner, invents a baby sitter in the scrum master and leaves everyone else to be the "dev team". I know there will be statements about it should be collaborative blah blah, but the fact is the named roles have gravitas and the amount of responsibly in the product owner individual is untenable. There is also then the wildly misunderstood aspect of estimation. In my experience the only value beyond saying a feature is easy or hard is that it does spark discussion among engineers, the irony being if said discussion goes on for too long it usually gets shut down. Adding estimates to work you are going to do within the next 2 weeks seems of limited value, it changes no behaviour you will still do the work. I feel we would be better served by reinforcing the principle that all of our purposes within the organisation is to deliver a quality product for the customer. Product development is responsible for taking ideas and generating specifications for product features while software engineering are responsible for taking specifications and implementing them within a software product. This simple process should be monitored and systematically improved to deliver better on the core principle.