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The way I decided to play the game was like this, "I won't be attending the Daily Standups anymore as I don't think they add value and do subtract value."

The project mgmt response was, "Attendance at standups is mandatory."

Regardless, I didn't go to anymore standups and when I got flack for that, I stopped going to the office all together. When I got flack for that, I stopped working all together.

Then I got fired. That solved all my scrum problems.

I got criticized for zoning out at scrum meetings. So I watched what the managers do. They show up for the first few minutes, look alert, then leave as if in a hurry. I started doing the same thing, and never had a problem again.

If you do this often enough. People will assume you are busy if you don’t show up at all.

Don't forget to always roll up your sleeves and carry around some papers.

If you are in a paperless office, tapping a tablet with a stylus as you walk confers the same office space prestige.

That seems to be secret for managers anyway. Always appear eager and motivated and then run away.

Because what do they all actually do? They spend a large portion of their time waiting around for numbers they add[0] to a spreadsheet and report those numbers to their manager.

That's it. (Ok, once a year they do reviews.)

[0] If they don't bug a dev to do it.

Attrition!

Great story from start to finish. I kept waiting for a happy turnaround but that ending was perfect.

Yea, same here.

This pretty much sums up my experience with Software Dev at one of the Big 4.

Thank you for giving me a really good laugh.

I feel like you work at my last company. But so many companies f* this up that it could be any company.

I got fired from any last job after being one of the only engineers willing to say something to management about this. I figured I had a popular opinion - many other engineers often DM'ed me on slack encouraging me to continue speak out, including my own manager, so I somehow figured I should be safe speaking out, politely, as a respected majority representative.

In fact I was dead wrong. By saying that scrum was a problem, I ended up making product managers / CTO who loved scrum and used it as an hour long opportunity to lecture the team every day feel threatened.

Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to my career, because in retrospect it was a dead end company that was run by fear. Management was afraid of ideas or challenge to power to the point where innovative ideas and feedback were never well received and a culture of fear and not stepping out of line arose, even though it was sugar coated with fake company values of "openness" that nobody really believed in but that managers loved as a way to elevate themselves.

I suspect many companies are a my least a little bit like this. Unfortunately it is human nature and there are so many stories in history, usually of narcissistic dictators, that mirror this.

This was a very extreme example but I'm sure many other companies struggle with this when it comes to challenging scrum. Managers tend to love scrum because it's a chance, daily, to "manage" and to get status updates so that they feel comforted. It makes it so that trust is no longer necessary, and bad managers are often bad at trust.

I guess another way to view scrum is to realize that it is often a reflection on management's subtle fears and insecurities being projected onto the processes of the company. It is an instance where employees unfortunately must manage up.

> Daily standup, nobody wants to be at. We have multiple teams arrive, with roughly 20 people in a small room

It is central to the idea of the daily standup is that it is one team.

> Its limited to 15 minutes, so nobody says much of importance, and just parrots what is already on the Jira board.

If you have another mechanism for sharing what each person has done and is doing, then the standup should just be for sharing information about and resolving barriers.

> Stories are supposed to be forecasts, not commitments. But the business doesn't like stories carried over, so they become commitments.

If you organizationally can't get away from commitments, then you need to cut back the amount you plan to do so that there is some slack. As long as you are also doing backlog grooming and have items groomed beyond the current sprint commitments, you can take additional items opportunistically, if there is excess capacity after doing the committed items properly.

> As long as you are also doing backlog grooming and have items groomed beyond the current sprint commitments, you can take additional items opportunistically, if there is excess capacity after doing the committed items properly.

The powers that be at my work decided that “sprint predictability” is the most important metric here. This means that if we pull in stuff near the end of the sprint but don’t finish, predictability goes down. Thus, we are encouraged to not take on extra work if we don’t expect to finish. What this means in reality is that we start working on it without pulling it into the sprint and then get a head start for next sprint.

What’s your take on that?

My (related) experience has led me to believe reporting to management should be strictly separate from any tools or processes used to track actual work, specifically to avoid dumb shit like this. Team task-tracking should be a team communication tool. If you want to report task-related stuff upstream it should be totally separate, with updates/sync done by a human (project manager would make sense).

I also think speculative future make-believe planning junk should be kept out of the real getting-shit-done tool. Put it in there when it actually matters. There should be no "on ice" or "phase 3" (when in "phase 1") crap in the tool the devs use. It may or may not make sense to have them involved in planning stuff that early, but keep the output of that planning away from the real-work trackers until it's closer to time to do it.

I think that's part of why Jira (and similar, heavy, report-focused tools) is so god-awful. It not only tries to have features for teams to get stuff done and for five other roles to dig around in tasks and reports for whatever reason, it enables and encourages that, and I'm fairly sure, at this point, that it's fundamentally a bad idea.

> My (related) experience has led me to believe reporting to management should be strictly separate from any tools or processes used to track actual work,

This probably increases the accuracy of the work trackers but increases the B.S. level of management reporting in organizations where there are fundamental problems between management and the working level.(Which is the only reason anyone would want to separate these two things.)

While this probably seems like an improvement from the working level, it's probably bad for the organization. The solution is not dis-integrating communication tools so that management's view is not connected to the actual work tracking, but dealing with the fundamental trust issues. Which is hard, of course, but things that are important often are.

I get why they want it, but I think it's a case of false improvements from adding more computers. If the reports to management are such BS that they don't usefully resemble reality they should be able to figure that out before long and sort things out, one way or another. If they want insight into the tools the bottom-of-the-ladder workers are using to coordinate then that coordination will suffer, greatly, and those tools themselves will be full of BS, for sure, gaining little aside from some pretty "real-time" BS graphs for management and worse communication for workers.

[EDIT] more to the point, I think if it worked we wouldn't still constantly see management surprised when things aren't delivered "on time", and yet, that still happens all the time. IMO the team needs someone "on their side" to report reality upwards, diplomatically, not their own work tools reporting up directly, or they'll lie to their tools, which leads to more surprises, not fewer.

There's certainly environments where that makes a lot of sense, particularly where the software at issue had immediate effects on external users who require advance notice of changes (I actually work in that kind of environment, and though we do have opportunistic items they generally are restricted to items that don't impact external users.)

If you're trying to do scrum properly, you shouldn't be consistently finishing work early. That implies you're overestimating stories.

When you do finish a bit early I've not normally found it a problem to find some small bits of tech debt, research, or admin work to fit in before the end of the sprint.

Starting work on stuff from the next sprint is not ideal because it'll throw your estimates off for the next sprint, plus you don't actually know for sure what is going into the next sprint.

What answer are you expecting? Your example indeed makes no sense, but it has nothing do with scrum and has everything to do with clueless people do stupid things. Do you expect this guy will suddenly do only sane logical things when using something other than scrum? I expect not.

I passionately hate being asked for "commitments". If it's stuff of any reasonable complexity or novelty I will have no idea how long it will take and therefore can't make any commitments. The only thing I can commit to is to make sure that people don't waste time and work towards the goal. The problem is that management has no problem wasting a lot of time with useless meetings or not committing to the final feature set but instead changing requirements all the time.

Changing requirements is fine, as long as they recognize that stuff like that impacts the schedule.

Generally they don’t though.

If you can say more than a minute, but less than a decade, you've already got SOME idea of the timeframe for a task. Granted that sort of estimate would get you called to HR for insubordination. But can you pull the bounds in from either direction at all?

I say this as someone just moving into project planning and management. From that perspective you start to see that some level of estimation s critical. My preference is to ask devs for just the tightest bounds to timeframe they're actually comfortable with, then estimate based on that and pass up the chain. I consider it to be on my shoulders if things take longer than I communicated upwards.

I understand that estimates are important and I give estimates. But recently in my company it’s fashionable to talk about “commitments” and I won’t give those. In my view this is just a way to get overtime and weekend work out of people once things fall behind so they meet their commitments. I commit to do my work as best as i can but I can’t commit to work overtime because of issues that are often out of my control.

That makes perfect sense. And I applaud your push against a practice that does seem to be pushing devs for unpaid overtime. You're right.

One manager I’ve worked with had the brilliant notion of “x2+1” time of what the dev says.

Anecdotally this has worked out remarkably well throughout my career - from single dev to cto - even stuff that I _new_ was going to take for example 2 days, if done properly ended up in like 5.

Didn’t matter if I was doing the estimate or someone else. At some point I just gave up and started doing the “my gut says 3 hours, so it must be 7 hours of work then, and send that up the chain. That cheeky “+1” had saved my ass more times than I can count.

I also generally have had good success with guessing a number and then multiplying it by 5 to get the time when it’s completely done, tested and documented.

I remember sitting in a meeting with the team discussing how we regularly failed to meet the our estimates and how this was bad.

I made exactly this suggestion and was laughed out of the room.

Granted this was for large and small estimates, but I still don't think it's the worst idea.

One of the points of Scrum is that you don't estimate hours at all. You estimate intentionally vague and abstract "story points". You don't need to know what that is in hours, just try to make sure that two stories of roughly equal complexity have roughly equal points. Run a few sprints, check what velocity you actually end up on, and you've got the averages you need to give a slightly more long term planning.

But without the feedback of actually having done the work, any estimate is bound to be wrong.

Even better is being told to commit by the Scrum Jesus (who does not even try to understand the business domain or engineering issues, since he's getting hired for being the Scrum Jesus) to stories with no one available for even defining or discussing them. Our story might have been just a word someone saw at a trade fair.

Then, two weeks later, being asked why I did not complete what I committed to.

In that situation I've gotten a lot of mileage (and quiet amusement) from pointing out that Scrum dropped the term "commitment" for "forecast" in 2011. Scrum Jesus has no defense against Scrum itself!

"Development Teams do not commit to completing the work planned during a Sprint Planning Meeting. The Development Team creates a forecast of work it believes will be done, but that forecast will change as more becomes known throughout the Sprint."

https://scrumguides.org/revisions.html, "Changes between 2010 and 2011 Scrum Guides"

> One gripe I have about scrum, is there is nobody representing engineering, as the product owner represents the business.

That is definitively not be the feeling you should have. In "proper" scrum the Team is supposed to represent engineering. If you, for some reason, don't feel like you can represent these concerns then that is a huge issue. The PO shouldn't be your boss either. At least it isn't so in the company I work for. It sounds like the PO is the boss of that team, if he "keeps you busy". I am super grateful that our Scrum Master knew what he was doing and suggested creating a separate line on the Org chart for the POs so that they are explicitly not in charge of development. The team is in charge and POs are more advisory.

Sounds to me like there are some deeper problems in the company then just the scrum. There are so many red flags in your comment. I don't know if those books are going to help you "play" scrum better, because what you guys are doing does not sound like scrum at all.

Kanbans probably also not a solution. I really like Kanban, but it isn't going to remove the bad elements that seem to control that company.

Yeah, that's an odd complaint. You are engineering, are you not? The meeting is already about engineering. If you have more engineering as an outside stakeholder that the PO isn't able to represent, by all means bring someone in to represent them.

this.

In scrum the dev teams maintains a technical backlog and fills the sprintbacklog as THEY see fit- from the product backlog AND the technical backlog.

the PO has no say in this! he can complain that he thinks not enough features from his product backlog are planned, but should trust that the team knows what they are doing.

First of all, most issues with process issues are more a reflection of the organization and what drives them than the process. I would say you should start talking about, 'Our process' instead of 'Scrum'.

>These things combined have dragged down the happiness of the people I work with, but we all feel imprisoned by it. I have a stack of scrum books here I plan on reading, I figure this process isn't going away and I need to up my game with how to play it - but I wish I could use something else, perhaps kanban.

Spoiler, your Scrum books aren't going to help you figure things out, unless your org actually wants to change. You have your own unique process, but that you have a unique process isn't an issue. The issue is that your management seems to not respect the input of engineering. No process will work the way you want as long as that is true.

Some thoughts, * Most critical, your team is way to big. Should be half as big

* Scrum master should be a team member and rotated along the team. The process should be a result of constant tuning via the Retrospective. The scrum master here, should lose his job.

* Engnineering owns the implementation of the stories, product owners should not be a part of the conversation on how to do something, they only can say 'what'.

* If you can't decide your own points, then again, you have your own process. If you can, and you need to refactor, you need to add points for that.

If you can't do anything to change, then again reading scrum books isn't going to help. You can say, 'this isn't the way your supposed to do this' as much as you want. processes always reflect the organization. Unless the engineering team is an equal to the product team, it won't matter what process you have.

However, many companies face similar issues. For a moment I thought the OP worked for my company because we face the same issues (that's not possible however because in person stand ups are banned at our company due to the distributed nature).

1) While I agree that 20 people seems like too large a team in general, I have a fundamental problem with the idea that scrum can determine what size team is right.

What seems to be happening, it appears to me, is that we have a fair idea of how large a meeting can be before it becomes unwieldy, and scrum has a daily meeting as it's fundamental component, so basically decides that for it's fundamental component to be effective there shouldn't be more than 8 people so therefore teams shouldn't be larger than 8 people.

That seems backwards to me.

2) Almost every scrum training usually has a separate scrum master. I do think the idea of a team member being the scrum master makes a lot of sense and would probably alleviate a lot of the concerns.

3) Scrum story points are supposed to reflect end user benefits. A refacorin's benefit will only show up after several sprints. In the meanwhile you hurt your velocity significantly because your refactoring is likely to be 0 points. Now, this actually makes sense to me, but the issue is that in most places management is carefully monitoring velocity and is gonna hold the drop against the team.

To be fair though, I think this is another issue where the real problem is management converting a measurement metric into a target, which basically negates any use it may have as a metric.

My biggest issues with scrum are: 1) A daily standup is ridiculous. It's highly disruptive and gives me the feeling of someone constantly peeking over my shoulder. A better strategy is a simple email when someone has an update, or a blocker to the rest of the team. Very few of my projects are done in a single day, and it's psychologically stressful to join every meeting saying I worked on story A, will continue working on story A for 3-4 days in a row, while the managerial types rattle off a list of meetings they attended, emails they sent, trainings they completed, etc. 2) Sprints are far too inflexible. Each story should basically define a new Sprint for the people involved in that story, which may or may not be longer than originally expected. I don't see the point of having a fixed 2 week period that applies to everyone. Why not just have a weekly or biweekly meeting where you go over everyone's stuff and see where you stand. It's basically a more flexible version of what sprints try to achieve, without the psychological issues created by having to fit things into a Sprint or alternatively having to carry it over into a whole new Sprint. That same meeting can track how many points were earned since the last meeting and you have your velocity being tracked as well.

Retrospectives are great. But they should be included in the same 2 week catch up meeting.

I find scrum tries to create a lot of artificial deadlines, possibly to encourage people to break things into smaller pieces and make regular progress, but I find that's not how people usually work. In my experience people tend to work more in spurts, delivering a ton of features and bug fixes over a couple of days, and then going relatively quiet for the next few days. Not because they aren't working, but because thats just how things usually pan out since software development is a decidedly non linear process.

> Scrum story points are supposed to reflect end user benefits.

That’s not my understanding at all. In our org, that’s the role of backlog priorities. Story points are the cost to get there, and are explicitly a tool to estimate relative amounts of effort involved.

If tech debt is to be incurred, it is expected that engineers negotiate that, and that other estimates will change as a result (and/or other tasks be created to track that debt). But then, nearly 100% of the managers in our org are, themselves, engineers or SMEs in the field they are managing, so they have realistic goals and understanding of the sausage-making process. What you’re describing really does sound more to me like a management problem than a process problem.

Eh, the idea that a team should be no larger than the number of people that can meet together is not unreasonable, if also not incontrovertible. What makes a team a team if they can't meet together as a team effectively?

I'd say the most important characteristic is whether the team can work together effectively.

As an example, one could consider the various people working on an individual open source project as part of a team. And most successful O/S projects rarely require everyone to meet together at the same time.

I personally strongly prefer small teams (I find even 8 members too large), but arguably certain projects may need bigger teams, and I think they should still be able to practice Agile with the bigger team, which scrum doesn't allow for.

I think the scrum team size is determined in part because communication overhead is exponential, getting beyond 6-8 people means the whole team has to spend a lot of extra time coordinating. This is true regardless of whether you're dong scrum or not. It's true some teams may be correctly sized at 20, but I would suspect that breaking that into 2-3 other teams would be a benefit most times.

Story Points represent effort and uncertainty, not business/customer value - those are Business Value Points. Devs are only committing to X story points per sprint. If refactoring is needed, it's built into the story points, or added as it's own task. And as others have said if the Product Owners don't take engineering input on paying down tech debt/infrastructure/internal tooling, then you have a broken company no matter what process you're following.

> 3) Scrum story points are supposed to reflect end user benefits.

Scrum.org states[0] A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of effort for completing requirements.

[0]: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-poi...

According to Jeff Sutherland himself[1], story points are based on team effort and not end-user benefit: Estimates are estimates for the team to get a story done.

[1]: https://www.scruminc.com/story-points-why-are-they-better-th...

Sometimes I find myself so stressed out by the standup, I basically doing nothing the rest of the day. Also I have a habit now to get up early and try to do yesterday's portion of work in an hour or two before standup just to report it. I completely stop thinking in time periods wider than sprint, and I thought before that was my strength. Worst thing, the process forces an idea that my struggle with it is, basically, my fault. I hate "scrum".

You are not alone. Meetings just suck all the energy out of me.

Thanks everyone for correcting my understanding of story points (which was based on scrum training provided by my current company).

Effort makes a lot more sense, and I particularly like that it tries to incorporate uncertainty as well (I guess that's why they chose story points, to make it vague, since using hours leads to people treating estimates as deadlines instead).

> Scrum master should be a team member and rotated along the team.

I don't agree. For us the scrum master is a fixed position who has as a responsibility to advise the teams on how to fix problems with their processes or to help build these processes in the first place. This works very well for us, because the scrum master is explicitly only an adviser.

Meaning I, as a team lead, do not have to do what the scrum master says, but I always have someone experienced with scrum who I can ask when problems arise or when the team wants to change the processes.

> Daily standup

I have never worked at a company where this actually goes right and could not be replaced by [insert ticketing system here]. We use Basecamp to do daily check-ins on a very high priority issue, if we have one, which we usually don't.

Managers are the only people that like daily standups, so far as I can tell.

I've never figured out why you couldn't just do it over slack or equivalent. It's massively inefficient to get everyone to meet up in the morning.

Many places do it over Slack.

Managers need to justify their jobs. Reading off a slack report every day seems too simple and not worthy the salary they're paid. Compare that to a large meeting and live status updates, everyone stands, etc. Now that is some "serious work" happening.

Think of it from the point of view that managers have mangers they report to. When shit goes wrong they have to cover their asses. "So it's late. But did you check on their progress? Wait just over slack, no actual meetings? Ok, that obviously needs improvement".

It's not like it's a requirement that "managers" be at a standup meeting. Some of the best teams I've worked on have done daily standups without managers, and I dare to say most of us enjoyed them and found them productive!

Managers are often looking for ways to fill their calendar. Meetings, calls that could be a two-minute Slack exchange, et c. Some will hop into meetings like that if they can. They love the recurring ones, especially, bonus if they can apologize any time they have to skip it for something that actually, maybe, matters ("uh, yeah, we don't care if you come, OK, thanks for apologizing I guess?")

I have never been in a team where managers were present at the standup meeting. In fact, sometimes I have no idea who my "manager" even is. We've got a team, we've got stakeholders, we do the work. If a manager wants to join, that's fine, but he's not in charge of that meeting.

All this talk of standup meetings being primarily for managers is really weird. It's not for managers, and they have no reason to be present. It's for the team, to improve cooperation within the team. If the team has a better way to accomplish that, then they should use that.

We do it in person on MWF and slack TTh. I find slack updates to be both more effective and more efficient. It is obviously why it is more efficient; but it’s actually more effective because unfortunately I am one of those many people who simply drift off when in a meeting, and putting updates down in writing helps infinitely.

My current place does it on slack and has a standup. Oh, and everything is also logged in jira tickets. Makes little sense, in my opinion.

Why are your managers attending stand up? The Daily Scrum is the team's meeting. I swear Scrum is only fragile because no one reads the bloody book, or if they do they skim it or ignore it.

From the scrum guide... "The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team."

It is the team's event, if there are other people there it should be at their request. The guide goes on to say that.. "If others are present, the Scrum Master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting."

If something is self-organized, there is no need for all this ceremony and bullshit that comes with capital-A Agile or Scrum. You just shoot the shit and talk about what you're doing.

Stand-ups and all the process attendant appears to be universally imposed from on high as a micromanagement technique, or because they were sold the idea as some kind of silver bullet by a talk or a snake-oil consultant.

I agree. Scrum is training wheels. If your team is mature and knows when to talk to each other then awesome, let the team do what works for them.

I feel like Scrum is for teams that suffer Stockholm syndrome from poor management and need to be taught how to human beings again.

I think Scrum provides a good baseline of working for new teams, but ultimately the team is free to shape it however it works best for them.

The main value of Scrum as an official process, is that it gives you a stick with which to chase toxic management out of the room. They're not sufficiently Scrum if they crash your meetings and demand to be in charge. Though in my experience, most companies that do Scrum have a management that keeps their distance unless invited.

I like standup on my current team. We're in an open office already, and just (physically!) stand up and say "I'm doing X today". Whole thing never goes over 2-3 minutes, and it's a friendly way to keep everyone up to date with the bigger picture.

It's similar at my office. We also use it to let the rest of the team know on occasions when you're blocked on something.

Why wait until a meeting to air that you are blocked, just sort it out when you become blocked. Where is the agility?

Exactly. I've always understood Scrum to be moderately successful at getting usable work out of terrible developers. Companies that use it should be avoided. If your employer introduces it it's time to quit.

Having dedicated communication time allows everyone to plan their dedicated focus or "deep work" time.

Generally if things can get unblocked as you go, that's better, and so this isn't particularly common. But sometimes you need your manager to go kick down a door for you and it's a handy time to let him know. Sometimes it's more benign and it's just easier to ask the group in person when everyone's together sipping their coffee together than it is to fire off a bunch of Slack messages or a group email or whatever.

And to be clear, when I say "blocked" I'm not talking like "I can't get any work done until X", I'm more talking like "this particular avenue needs X to happen before I can continue it, so I'm shelving it for now and doing something else until we can get it resolved." If you find yourself in the former case, something has already gone horribly wrong that should probably have been resolved days ago.

There are different ways something can be blocked. It's possible something is too complex to wrap your head around and you need an extra set of eyes and brains, or it might be blocked by outside impediments. It doesn't really matter, all obstacles need to be addressed and solved somehow.

This is a very important point that's often forgotten. You shouldn't wait for the appropriate meeting, but address it right away. The next stand up meeting is more of a backstop. It's the time to admit: "I guess I really am stuck here. Can anyone else look at this?"

Smoothly running teams don't need this, but many teams don't run that smoothly, and then it's better to address it at the stand up than not at all.

From what I understand, that's the end goal, with daily standup being a way to break the ice and get people who like to silo themselves off to actually ask instead of making no progress.

I think this gets at a very common problem with managers in the hierarchy. They forget that iteration of processes is crucial to good agile process. Your goal isn't to adhere to "true scrum." Your goal is to tailor scrum to what your team needs.

If your daily stand-ups are just repeating the JIRA board, then just give people back their time. If your features are coming out badly designed, then stick a designer in the engineering pods, or call out the design phase in project lifecycle.

If your projects are consistently late, then... slow down the estimates!

Of course teams that do it right tend to know this, but the bad implementations of scrum I've seen consistently lack attentive iteration on the process itself.

Are you in a position to effect change? If not, leave if you can. If not and you can't leave, suck it up.

Otherwise, here's a couple of notes freely given with no claim to excellence except that I've worked with successful scrum teams and unsuccessful ones:

* The 'business' is everything. All code is liability. Code that can't do things the business wants to do and hinders those things is a particular cost to the business. Product Owners who don't understand that "refactoring code to make it extensible before extending it" is the cost of doing business just have to learn that lesson. If they won't, let them go. Bad ones are a dime a dozen so you can always hire another clueless one if you want. It's like having a loan that you're paying lots of interest on. Saying "We can't spend time refinancing that. We have to go earn money." doesn't make sense as some absolute truth.

* Engineering is not in contrast to the business side. There is no need to represent engineering because the product owner is supposed to be able to understand all inputs into the program. If engineering is slowed down by the lack of dealing with some technical debt that's not some engineering problem divorced from the business. It's the business. This requires reaching across from the engineering side, being clear when things aren't going well, not starting on ridiculously long "refactoring" projects that are just lateral changes, and being clear what the expected outcome of any tech debt relief is. Avoid "feels cleaner", "is more elegant", "is more extensible". Talk in terms of outcomes: faster response to outages, the ability to add things like X (requires you to understand the product some, which is something an engineer should do), less time spent debugging issues. If trivially measurable, measure and demonstrate improvement. Builds trust.

* I'm not too convinced "Scrum Master" needs to be a solo job for anyone. The incentives are skewed. If you have a team of ideal people and they all pick up on the principles and you correct the bad patterns they have, they won't need you. The job inherently obsoletes itself which means the median person taking the role will entrench themselves in process to keep themselves relevant.

* 20 people at daily standup makes no sense. It's 10 minutes or 15 or whatever so you have 30 s to describe something. It isn't so much the time, though, but the fact that there are too many people here together in the room. It makes no sense. Find smaller units of organization. Conway's law presents but the alternative is much worse.

Standups can have their use but I can't imagine a 20 person standup being useful. Why do you bring so many teams together for it?

> User Stories are supposed to be forecasts, not commitments.

Indeed the commitment is supposed to be with the sprint goals. I've seen this vital aspect of scrum getting overlooked too often.

It sounds like you're missing probably the most important part of agile which is "at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly".

In Scrum, it's retrospectives.

Continuous improvement is a theme that runs across agile, scrum, lean. Without giving feedback, how are you going to improve?

> nobody says much of importance, and just parrots what is already on the Jira board

Worse, the moment anything of interest gets being discussed, SM stops it, saying "let's take this offline" (in German-speaking projects at least, where there's a tendency to use English words to really say nothing at all). Which brings us to

> any deviation from scrum itself poses a threat to this person's job security, so it doesn't happen

MBAs have identified and captured the role of a Scum master (sic!) to comfortably represent a project towards management, without the responsibilties of a project manager (I'm just moderating the project), yet with an instrument to turn time-based freelancing and employed work into a fixed-price deal through commitments/forecasts.

Standups with multiple teams, or simply very large teams, are a terrible idea. I'm currently in a team that has very quick, fun and productive daily standups (despite not even having a good standup space for it), but we have only 3 devs and a handful or other people involved.

But I've also been in projects where standups drag on and on and on, and they're hard to get under control. Usually, those projects had much larger teams.

I suggest smaller teams, and if you have this kind of multi-team standup, discuss with your team to have your own independent standup instead and send one representative to the big one.

> Daily standup

Change them so that people talk about what is blocked then.

> Scrum master

Tricky, like anyone who doesn't want to adapt.

> Technical debt

Create tickets for debt, put them on the backlog.

> Poor product owners

Tricky.

> Create tickets for debt, put them on the backlog.

That will risk making a huge technical debt section in the backlog that will find it hard to get priority. It's better to condition new features/bugfixes on the cleanup that caused them. "I can add this feature in 1 day but will need 4 days to clean it up. So my estimate is a week." I constantly nag developers to do this when they find that they are pressed for time and want to make a hack.

-"I'm nearly done but I can't find a nice way of doing this because of an existing code smell so I'm considering adding another smell"

-"Did you ever find that this was NOT the case?"

-"No..."

-"So do you always double or triple your estimates so you know you can comfortably refactor"

-"No..."

I think this is a disease of Scrum. Too short estimates exist because developers pat themselves on the back for finishing things quickly.

That will just lead to stories to change something simple the color of a button taking 3 days because you hit a tech debt minefield refactoring. You don’t want someone looking at JIRA and seeing it took you 3 days to change a simple button color.

Keep technical debt in separate tasks to make the tech debt visible and to keep management accountable for not making efforts to get rid of it.

This is terrible but has nothing to do with scrum. Poor management won't magically disappear after adopting scrum.