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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

> they have rigid processes (Scrum Master! everyone use this big board of tasks!)

There's something wrong with scrum?

Scrum is terrible and an abomination of what agile was supposed to be. Arbitrary sprints with perverse incentives that reduce taking riskier long term bets and prevent any sense of ownership for engineers. Works fine when you have junior engineers but competent professionals are much better served but ditching this crap.

I’ve worked with plenty of senior engineers who prefer it too. As I said in my own reply, I personally don’t. But I don’t think it’s right to frame it as determined by experience level. I do think, like OP, it’s good to prioritize finding team fit where there needn’t be conflict over things like this.

Edit: also, universally rejecting tools/processes is just as much a rejection of Agile principles as adopting them blindly. The whole idea is to choose what works for people doing the work.

I felt the same way when I had scrum imposed on me by an incompetent person. I have since come back around and implemented scrum myself to track some stuff I’m working on. It’s good for details.

I had this same experience by proxy and myself was very skeptical. I had asked people around me what they thought about scrum and almost universally people were unclear on what it was supposed to do for them and for each person there was a different complaint.

I read some books on it and overall surveyed it and found that in each of these cases they weren't really doing scrum and were never told why they'd be doing each part because no one bothered. I implemented scrum with my team after explaining exactly what benefits we wanted out of it (for the team mainly, but it also helps stakeholders) and it's a lot better than the pseudo-agile unstructured work we had before at the very least.

We're a part of the planning process, we know the basic motivations behind the things we're doing (user stories' "... so that..." section) and a much clearer picture of when a feature is done (acceptance criteria), our time evaluations are the only ones that matter and have nothing to do with some manager's idea of when something ought to be done.

I'm sure we'll adjust things as time passes and we recognize deficiencies, but I'm pretty happy with even the basic things we get out of it and some of our team members who were previously not happy with scrum are saying it's much better when you know why you're doing these things and when you actually do key parts of the process and don't rip out important bits.

Scrum Master with capitals means that someone bought a course and that someone is probably in management, not product. All of Agile with capital comes from a distrust of management against their engineers, that management knows better how the engineers should be spending their time than they do.

To be fair, agile with lowercase does have some really good ideas in it. It’s the distrust that’s a problem, not the system that gets chosen.

See related

https://youtu.be/vSnCeJEka_s - The death of Agile - Allen Holub

It works really well for some, and really doesn’t for others. I’m in the latter camp, and my colleagues have generally been pretty evenly split. That said, as sibling reply said, “Scrum Master” can carry a lot more meaning than practicing Scrum… and I’d add that it can carry a lot more meaning than the role as a term too.

I won’t go on the whole rant about Agile cargo-cult stuff. I’m sure there’s more of it already posted, there certainly is plenty to be had around the net. But yeah, a lot of people hate Scrum. If you want a sincere personal take on why it doesn’t work well for me, I’m happy to share my take.

Probably not with Scrum, but with the Scrum Master. Scrum has a set of tools that helps managing teams and they guy is probably forcing everybody to do those things, because that's his role (or else, he wouldn't be needed).

Agile teams should be able to choose whatever tool fits them. Pair programming or stand-up meetings is not working or people are not satisfied? Scratch that off for now and try again later or in a different way.

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