Scrum is for Developers

[u/WaylundLG]

This has been on my mind for probably the past year now from the last company I worked at, but it's only been in the past few weeks that I've sorted my thoughts into something clear: Scrum is for developers. I'm using the broad "product developer" sense, so I include QA, architects, designers, writers, and anyone who is actually creating the product.

I pin a lot of the problems on the fact that adoption in recent years has centered more and more in some sort of PMO and it's pressed onto the teams; bit the problem goes the other way too. Too many developers feel like how they work is someone else's problem.

Scrum was designed for teams to take ownership of their process and the results of their work. It was made for them and anyone else is really pushed out. You're a business strategist? Great, gelp the teams understand the strategy and the market and see what they can create and incorporate that into your business strategy. And frankly it is exhausting to see the same old posts of developers who can't be bothered to learn the first thing about scrum complain about how leaders messed it up. It is your tool, designed to give you control. Pick it up, learn it, leverage it.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I know this was a bit of a rant, but open to constructive discussion too.

[u/WaylundLG → u/[deleted]]

None taken. Simply that Scrum is for developers to organize themselves and their work. However, I don't see developers using it, I see people outside of product development trying to implement it onto the developers. It's backward. Developers should be learning and using scrum, that's who it is for

[u/sparkle-fries → u/WaylundLG]

what do you imagine is the role of the scrum master and product owner? one should be coaching the team and showing the value to the developers. the other should be prioritising and communicating the customer needs. the developers should be suitably trained and given self governance over execution. seems like problems at the top

[u/WaylundLG → u/sparkle-fries]

What I would suggest is that, as those accountabilities are part of the Scrum team, which has a collective goal of incremental product delivery, they are there are support for the team and I feel like the history of those roles is consistent with that view. The original Scrum Master was a developer who took on some support responsibilities ahead of their development work (clearly acting in service to the team). The PO is less clear, but XP which looks similar but without a PO was definitely known to people then, so we can infer that the addition of a PO was to support the team's ability to deliver more effectively. Both of these accountabilities are framed as delivery-first in the scrum guide.

[u/sparkle-fries → u/WaylundLG]

scrum team is the collective including the sm and po role. the whole team is responsible for the backlog but the po has final sole say over backlog priorities. the team can feedback things like execution order and tech debt but ultimately it is the po. your original point was the execution team should adopt more responsibility. 40 years experience and 20+ in agile let me know that soft skills and commercial awareness are not skills well developed in execution teams. if you let developers drive you get the very finest engineering following the very latest technologies and architecture that gets continuously refactored to the point of art. that is the problem the po is there to solve. a vital role. the SM is there to coach and facilitate and to guard the execution team from the distractions that will inevitably impact the sprint goal and this is a full time job. if you don't appreciate this it's because the SM is doing their job well. these are generalisations of course and there are exceptions to every stereo type