Comment by xedrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xedrac | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com