3 ms·

What (or who) made them decide they needed scrum in the first place?

• freedomben 3y ago
  IME, it's usually a new hire, usually a product person. There's always pressure on those people to introduce changes to increase whatever the KPI metric is, and from their perspective scrum is a great choice. Plus management drools over data/metrics, no matter how much you explain to them that there are serious flaws with the data. You get more of what you measure, and the law of unintended consequence can be a beast. I've seen people come under the Eye of Sauron because they weren't closing as many "story points" as their peers. In reality it's because this person was the best mentor on the team, and the most experienced in the codebase. They spent most of their time pairing and training others, but only one person gets to make the commit and claim the points. That person initially stopped helping people and would (understandably) get irritable when asked questions, and then left the company. Management considered it a win to dispense with a "low velocity" engineer. It hurts my soul to think about the stupidity, especially since they were told numerous times that this person was the MVP of the team, no matter what the metrics said. You get more of what you measure.