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>Most of Scrum's bad rep comes from people who think they know better, tweak it to suit their needs, then realize they made a ton of holes in the system and the

>Most of Scrum's bad rep comes from people who think they know better, tweak it to suit their needs, then realize they made a ton of holes in the system and their Frankenscrum doesn't really work. I remember when Scrum came out. It's a very specific method for a very specific company type that was sold to work with any company. Before scrum, each company kinda figured out their own processes based on their size, team composition, output requirements, and their risk tolerance. Ticket systems existed before scrum, feedback loops existed before scrum, bug tracking existed before scrum, prioritization existed before scrum. Scrum just took all the things that already existed and put them in a very specific and somewhat restrictive process. It was eye candy for the execs who had no idea how their department worked, it was a cash cow for the consultants selling it. It's ok if you don't have anything else or you're dealing with high turnover or something like that, but if you have a mature department already, it's probably more restrictive than not.

knightofmars 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've experienced the exact opposite. The company I work with had been doing waterfall development for 15+ years. We switched to agile using the Scrum framework. It wasn't smooth sailing the entire way, there were teams early on that struggled with adopting Scrum. Most often it was due to the team attempting to solve every retro issue by updating "the process", which only addressed symptoms instead of fixing underlying communication problems within the team. The other major hurdle was getting product to accept that a roadmap isn't a set of commitments but is instead a list of prioritized "wants". Now, we're 3 years out from the switch and most of those pain points have been removed. It's lead to massive improvements in quality, predictability, and overall happiness across the company.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  I had the same experience, in a longtime waterfall company, that adopted Scrum, with significant pain points but it was still a world of improvement. The thing that the Scrum haters don't see is that its biggest benefit is invisible -- it's in what doesn't happen, in what Scrum avoids. Scrum avoids the eighteen-month waterfall death marches that kill a department or a company. Scrum gets you thinking in terms of managing scope, of pacing deliverables, of thinking of a list of prioritized "wants" as you say rather than a dictated set of commitments. Scrum makes you approach development as it has to actually happen in the real world, rather than as a dictated plan that inevitably won't survive contact with adversity. Of course it's completely possible to still mess that up, with overzealous adherence to process and ceremony and metrics. It's very possible to run Scrum as a set of perpetual two-week waterfalls -- and very possible that that's still a great improvement over two-year waterfalls.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    The problem with scrum discussion is it's always compared to waterfall, particularly unyielding waterfall. Even construction planning, which is where waterfall came from, of has slips and adjustments. There were other methodologies other than waterfall before agile or scrum arrived. I went to college in the mid 90s and they taught that waterfall existed but a more iterative approach was actually used in practice. If you were doing immutable waterfall, anything would have been better, maybe including nothing at all. Having said that, I'm glad Scrum worked for you.

knightofmars 5y ago

Anecdotally, I've experienced the exact opposite. The company I work with had been doing waterfall development for 15+ years. We switched to agile using the Scrum framework. It wasn't smooth sailing the entire way, there were teams early on that struggled with adopting Scrum. Most often it was due to the team attempting to solve every retro issue by updating "the process", which only addressed symptoms instead of fixing underlying communication problems within the team. The other major hurdle was getting product to accept that a roadmap isn't a set of commitments but is instead a list of prioritized "wants". Now, we're 3 years out from the switch and most of those pain points have been removed. It's lead to massive improvements in quality, predictability, and overall happiness across the company.

vikingerik 5y ago
I had the same experience, in a longtime waterfall company, that adopted Scrum, with significant pain points but it was still a world of improvement. The thing that the Scrum haters don't see is that its biggest benefit is invisible -- it's in what doesn't happen, in what Scrum avoids. Scrum avoids the eighteen-month waterfall death marches that kill a department or a company. Scrum gets you thinking in terms of managing scope, of pacing deliverables, of thinking of a list of prioritized "wants" as you say rather than a dictated set of commitments. Scrum makes you approach development as it has to actually happen in the real world, rather than as a dictated plan that inevitably won't survive contact with adversity. Of course it's completely possible to still mess that up, with overzealous adherence to process and ceremony and metrics. It's very possible to run Scrum as a set of perpetual two-week waterfalls -- and very possible that that's still a great improvement over two-year waterfalls.
- Clubber 5y ago
  The problem with scrum discussion is it's always compared to waterfall, particularly unyielding waterfall. Even construction planning, which is where waterfall came from, of has slips and adjustments. There were other methodologies other than waterfall before agile or scrum arrived. I went to college in the mid 90s and they taught that waterfall existed but a more iterative approach was actually used in practice. If you were doing immutable waterfall, anything would have been better, maybe including nothing at all. Having said that, I'm glad Scrum worked for you.