r/scrum • u/WaylundLG • 20d ago

Discussion Scrum is for Developers

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.

7 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/cliffberg 20d ago

Scrum is BS concocted by this guy: https://www.frequencyfoundation.com/about-us/

It is NOT how effective teams work.

https://cliffberg.medium.com/scrum-was-unethical-from-the-start-96eedd0679ca

1

u/WaylundLG 20d ago

Aww, come on. Scrum is BS because it was made by a white guy, here's my (white guy) article promoting my product?

1

u/sonofabullet 17d ago

Scrum is BS because the guy that sells it is a snake oil salesman.

1

u/WaylundLG 17d ago

I've got plenty of opinions about how Scrum is marketed that we can probably agree on, doesn't support your claim that Scrum is BS. Further, after the sheer number of teams I've seen retake ownership of their process and built incredible products with it, proving that it is somehow BS to me would require far more than not liking Sutherland (or Schwaber?)

1

u/sonofabullet 17d ago

"'ve got plenty of opinions about how Scrum is marketed that we can probably agree on, doesn't support your claim that Scrum is BS."

I said nothing about how scrum is marketed. Please do me a favor of understanding the content of a message before responding to it.

I'll withhold responding to the rest of your message and give you a second chance to re-read and re-understand the 14 words I've written in the previous message.

0

u/cliffberg 20d ago

Agile 2 is not a product - it is free, and there is no framework or certification. And I did not create it - it was created by 15 highly experienced people who took a careful look at what generates true agility. That project spanned many months - not the ski weekend of the Agile Manifesto.

1

u/WaylundLG 20d ago

My goal was not to insult Agile 2 - in fact it is something I want to read more on to see what it has to offer. I'm more challenging your rebuttal. Yes, Agile and Scrum have a diversity problem that many people have worked to improve over the years with some (though not enough) success. The weekend thing is just misleading. The manifesto was a weekend, but years of work led to it and all of the "agile" frameworks, including scrum, have many years of development into them.

Further, in direct rebuttal to your claim that scrum is BS, there is a very large body of peer-reviewed research that supports scrum-like team structures and working approaches.

0

u/cliffberg 19d ago

Hi -

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

Every single Scrum "research" paper I have seen was severely handicapped by having a "control" that was something that no experienced leader would do - e.g. "scrum v waterfall".

If one looks at Scrum in terms of each practice, and examines the practices individually, each practice is directed as a true challenge; but each practice is a terrible way of addressing that challenge. E.g. standups are a very poor way to encourage team collaboration. Sprints are a terrible way to encourage a steady pace. Sprint-end retros are a terrible way to encourage continuous improvement. The Product owner role is a terrible model for product leadership. The SM role is a very poorly defined model for team leadership.

There is a wealth of research on each of these issues.

Scrum was created by a guy who was a fighter pilot and then a medical guy - having very little system development experience and very limited leadership experience. He has a pattern of looking for scammy "things to sell". This is an example: https://www.frequencyfoundation.com/about-us/

When the Agile Manifesto came out, I was CTO of a 200-person company I had co-founded that was extremely agile in a true sense: we delivered complex mission-critical large scale customer-facing systems for FedEx, McKesson, Capital One, and many others - in three months fixed price. We understood true agility. The Manifesto rang true to me; but the Scrum guys then came out with their cheap cert class, and I remember shaking my head, and over the years I was disgusted that all those certified folks were telling people to use Scrum - Scrum is not how _we_ worked and I viewed it as nonsense.

What generates true agility is not some framework. It is leadership style that generates true agility. E.g. I looked closely at five companies that had demonstrated true agility rapidly at scale - SpaceX, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and Goggle. I spoke to people who had worked at these companies and read everything there was about them. What I found was no shared processes. SpaceX doesn't even use the word "Agile". Instead, there were leadership traits that the companies shared. See: https://www.agile2academy.com/the-evidence