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Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

Scrum is pretty lightweight. A lot of people add to the core of Scrum and refer to the whole thing as Scrum when that is not accurate. A few uber coders in a garage cranking out their dream idea may not need Scrum. In my experience, it’s most needed in the corporate world where there are tons of development teams being hounded by managers and product owners to constantly cram more and more work into a fixed amount of time left before some arbitrary deadline, and getting management buy-in on Scrum or something similar can actually be a much-needed protection for dev team sanity.

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This sums up my thinking. Scrum is a contract between developers and managers, especially non-technical managers.

Developers have always complained about being micromanaged or being given business objectives that don't make sense or about changing requirements or some such. But non-technical managers at the same time typically complain that their developers are prima donnas and that their team produces unpredictable and non-repeatable results.

If you understand KPI's, you understand scrum. Scrum exposes the development process to managers and in theory is supposed to give them a better idea of what the team is doing, what they're having problems with, and what the consequences of their management directives are. If that leads to better management of the team, scrum is a success.

Yes, and Scrum done well can promote a sense of well-being through fulfillment of points and provides rhythmic but varying work for those that like process.

Done poorly it may create a wealth of problems. The cadence may create undue sense of urgency that may lead to unhealthy levels of stress or to depression and desensitization of missing work targets. Nonsense competition may arise due to points and velocities.

But Scrum reinforces all of that; arbitrary deadlines, sprints check; lack of control, product owner the only named role check; process centric, corporate compatibility check.

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