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Comment by bladelessninja2 | Hacker News Reader

Just like there are companies who say they are Agile, but they are not, there are teams who think they have Scrum, but it is not Scrum. If you say that Scrum encourages tech debt and you had no autonomy then probably it wasn't Scrum. The other option is that you were using Scrum where it doesn't fit.

By Pareto principle: 80% of times when I see "The tool X sucks" it is because people are using wrong tool or they are using tool wrong.

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We can debate the purity of scrum, but in practice, every company I've worked for has modified it to suit management desires, and those modifications have almost always been to the detriment of developers. For example, the "complexity" of a story is inevitably interpreted as "time". And the end of every sprint is often turned into a deadline that leads to tech debt. Creative development is not always a linear process, which scrum somewhat enforces. I think it could work if every story was treated as a spike, and every spike could be pre-empted by new spikes as you discover new things. If it was able to truly flow the same way software devs actually think and work, then it could work. The result of a spike could be a finished work, or perhaps many other spikes. This would model creative development better. But companies don't go for this because they cannot easily estimate time and schedules.

Once I worked in a team that used scrum almost correctly, and it was a great experience.

Then there was a change in management, and the new manager decided to "introduce scrum" to the whole company. We were told to stop doing what we did previously, and instead to do what the new manager called scrum. Unsurprisingly, it was the same parody of scrum that most companies use. The productivity plummeted, and the developers in our team gradually left the company.

I suspect that scrum works well when it is introduced by the developers, and works horribly when it is introduced by the managers.

The only thing that worked for me when fighting managers as such was to expose where they are wrong about scrum and/or agile. Foursquare, boldly, without emotions. Speak up guys, you are paid to be experts, share your expertise with the org.

I know what you are talking about, but those are the things I would never agree upon. This is against scrum, against agile. Where I can agree that scrum is not always the way, I truly believe agile is how software development should be done, so I can't even count how many of conversations about it I had with all those managers. Outcomes were two: they agreed to change and project was successful in most of the cases or I quit and project failed in most of the cases, so my experience is only strengthening my views over time.

> but in practice, every company I've worked for has modified it to suit management desires

I agree that is the way it is often, but that is to the argument to the poster before: not SCRUM anymore.

I was told this once by a scrum trainer when I told him it sucked. I then challenged him to figure out which part we were doing wrong. He couldn't coz we pretty much did it to the letter - following the directives from another scrum trainer.

I call it the no true scrumsman fallacy.

Doing it "properly" means doing a series of mini waterfalls. Thats just how it was designed.

I'd say it functions as a poor but semi functioning compromise between an intransigent waterfall management and an agile team.

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