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Scrum is good for delivering small incremental results in a chaotic environments, and is popular because it naturally provides a tunable paper trail for mediocr

Scrum is good for delivering small incremental results in a chaotic environments, and is popular because it naturally provides a tunable paper trail for mediocre managers to cover their asses with. But if you are trying to anything ambitious from either a product or engineering perspective then scrum will absolutely kill you, first by sucking the life out of your best engineers until they leave, and then obscuring any important ideas or real progress under a sea of administrivia.

mikedelfino 2y ago
Do you mean kanban is a better fit for what you're describing or something else entirely?
- deaddodo 2y ago
  As someone with 14+ years in the California tech scene, they're both fairly terrible for large pushes unless you have a stellar product team that can pull all of the small scoped work together into a larger effort. Generally, there is a reason enterprises use standard Waterfall and the like; they're not looking for agility and quick-response, they're building large scale applications and iterating upon them. (I'm a startup kinda person and prefer that environment, just pointing out the merits of more glacial enterprise style development cycles/pipelines)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
steve1977 2y ago
In most placed I‘ve been, Scrum was basically an excuse to not having a clue, not having a plan, not being able to plan and not being able to execute a plan. Ok, let’s make that „all places“. And Agile in general.
charles_f 2y ago
> is popular because it naturally provides a tunable paper trail for mediocre managers to cover their asses Honestly you're giving too much credit to mediocre managers. There's no intent behind adopting scrum. Mediocre managers adopt it because that's how you deliver, right? We're Agile and Agile = sprints. Also I'm too scared to not have precise dates when my management is asking for them, and these sprints are very practical to ask devs to provide high confidence estimates and dates so that we can know what will exactly happen in the next 6 months (I've heard of real professionals who can even plan for a year!). Change is scary!

mikedelfino 2y ago

Do you mean kanban is a better fit for what you're describing or something else entirely?

deaddodo 2y ago
As someone with 14+ years in the California tech scene, they're both fairly terrible for large pushes unless you have a stellar product team that can pull all of the small scoped work together into a larger effort. Generally, there is a reason enterprises use standard Waterfall and the like; they're not looking for agility and quick-response, they're building large scale applications and iterating upon them. (I'm a startup kinda person and prefer that environment, just pointing out the merits of more glacial enterprise style development cycles/pipelines)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

steve1977 2y ago

In most placed I‘ve been, Scrum was basically an excuse to not having a clue, not having a plan, not being able to plan and not being able to execute a plan. Ok, let’s make that „all places“. And Agile in general.

charles_f 2y ago

> is popular because it naturally provides a tunable paper trail for mediocre managers to cover their asses Honestly you're giving too much credit to mediocre managers. There's no intent behind adopting scrum. Mediocre managers adopt it because that's how you deliver, right? We're Agile and Agile = sprints. Also I'm too scared to not have precise dates when my management is asking for them, and these sprints are very practical to ask devs to provide high confidence estimates and dates so that we can know what will exactly happen in the next 6 months (I've heard of real professionals who can even plan for a year!). Change is scary!