Ask HN: What comes after Scrum? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What comes after Scrum?

1 pointadrianmsmith1 comment

Currently I hear more and more people talking about Scrum being the "old way" of developing software, but imho Scrum is still extremely entrenched (at least here in Europe).

At my current place (product company) we do things like: have a one hour meeting to discuss what we're going to discuss in a later one hour backlog meeting, the output of which which will decide what we "analyze" in 4 separate 1 hour full-team estimation meetings, which will dictate what we "commit" to during the full-day full-team demo/retro/commitment scrum day. We do this every 2 weeks.

No wonder Product Management seem unsatisfied with the progress we're making, but they seem powerless to stop this madness.

What project management approach have you seen gaining in popularity to replace Scrum? What comes next? Any ideas?

The answer is usually Kanban. Once people realize that Scrum is heavy handed, they simplify and focus on moving work forward without all the meetings -- Kanban.

But a team that goes off the rails with Scrum isn't ready for Kanban. And your description is a team off the rails: Scrum does have daily meetings and occasional estimation, but not to the level you are describing. And Scrum has mechanisms in place to determine what fits in a sprint, and what happens if work slips. In scrum, there is no such thing as a commitment meeting - even the word was removed from the practice [1]. There is a sprint planning meeting, but that should be a quick setup to slide in whatever the most important cards are, based on the backlog work the PM has done. If that meeting is more than 30 minutes, your PM isn't setting up the project correctly.

And that is the big blocker to Kanban - Because many of the guardrails are removed in Kanban (with a couple different ones added), a team can just grab tasks when they are ready. There has to be a solid PM lining up the tasks in the correct order both technically and for the business for that to work. If your PM is having trouble lining up a prioritized list to put in a Sprint, they aren't ready for Kanban.

[1] https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast

Reply on news.ycombinator.com