Comment by world32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by world32 | Hacker News Reader

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No, compared to conventional project management, i.e. having a project manager who understands the technical aspects but also meets with the stakeholders to balance feature development with solving technical debt, it is much slower and more frustrating to work in. Its really not that hard to manager a team of developers - keep track of whos working on what and make decisions with the team if something is blocking a piece of work being done. SCRUM tries to formalise everything with explicit rules which in reality robs developers of their ability to use common sense to get things done and results in hours and hours of meetings to discuss, review and improve the various rules and protocols.

I think it is a fad, most of the people I know who are big fans of it are also fans of whatever other tech fad is going on at the moment i.e. blockchain, nosql, the latest frontend framework etc. I find it extremely unfortunate that SCRUM is so widely practiced in the software industry now, at one point it actually caused me to quit my job to move to a different IT career, though in the end I went back to development because I love coding and I've just had to realise that SCRUM is something I'll have to live with.

There has been plenty written on this subject, here is some more reading:

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-an...

http://okigiveup.net/not-big-fan-of-scrum/

Queue the "thats not scrum" responses..

I find these comments fascinating. Scrum formalizes using rules? Compared to what? Read the PMBOK and then say that. I do Scrum specifically because it drops all the rules and leaves it to the right smart people to figure things out. I can't even imagine how Scrum with lots of rules would work. I've done Scrum since 2004 (got the SM cert too) and I truly don't understand what you mean by that.

The idea that any project manager can be all that is so dangerously optimistic. And yes, I realize there exists some PM somewhere who proves it is possible to be a good project manager. But the existence of an outlier does not move the bell curve, it's part of the bell curve. Most PMs need to be taught to rely on their devs and product owners so they stop screwing up projects themselves.

There is nothing so dangerous as a bad manager, especially a manager who thinks, "I've got this....". And there are so many bad managers. Scrum helps mitigate this by spreading the responsibility around to the people most likely to get it, not by tossing rules at a team.

Scrum rules: https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#definition

Perhaps you are right that good project managers are not too common, however, I find it easier to reason with one single manager than to reason with an entire team who has defined themselves as a "SCRUM team". In my experience the dogmatic nature of SCRUM means that teams take on an almost religious attitude towards it. A team like that is far more difficult to reason with than a single bad manager and disagreemnts often end with the conclusion "Yes but we do SCRUM and SCRUM says to do this.".

SCRUM contains some good princeples which I agree with like iterative releases and attempting to break down stories into manageable chunks, but the reality is that SCRUM is more than just a set of princeples to take on board, otherwise it would not be a multi-million dollar industry for SCRUM consultants and such.

You are right though, SCRUM has its use in preventing bad managers and bad teams from doing bad things. However at the same time I think it hinders good managers and good teams from doing good work.

Thank you for a well written response.

I think maybe we agree on something. Religious fanaticism can break any good process. I see Scrum as a place to practice flexibility. Example: I have a dev team that is only two devs, a husband and wife team. We don't do standups because they are together all the time and don't need that feedback and daily planning.

I'll be adding someone to that team soon and will need to add some formality so that feedback and daily planning are sufficient.

I have no room for fanaticism in my processes. It breaks stuff.

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