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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

It's about both, it's just that ritualized Big-A Agile isn't about either. It's about the appearance of speed and selling certifications to companies and management that don't know better.

I think "velocity" (from Scrum) actually evoked the correct idea, but most people seem to forget that velocity != speed. Velocity is a pair, speed and direction. Raw speed is useless if you're heading the wrong way (e.g., towards a solution for the wrong problem because you didn't bother validating along the way).

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But if you can adjust the direction fast enough, you can quickly recover from the wrong direction. That is, it's about speed of adjusting, not just speed. (In sports, it's the difference between speed and quickness.)

Only if you adjust into the right direction, and keep it after the adjustment.

Theoretically, scrum was aimed at adjusting faster. But if the adjustments just keep coming, you won't go anywhere.

But equally you don't burn on for months in the wrong direction

If the adjustments just keep coming you have a business problem and no "process" will save you.

Where I currently work it's absolutely a process problem (of Scrum). The version of scrum they're running wants you to just get the committed stuff done, and it's irrelevant what it leads to. There is no room for understanding the end goal and making sure you reach it, with a set deadline as well.

You might as always happens attack them for not doing Scrum right, and I'll tell you that's the age-old cry of the agile-folks: you're not doing it right, and nobody ever was.

Fuck scrum, it's not agile, never was and never will be.

What prevents the committed stuff from going in the right direction? Is it that the business leaders keep changing the direction or that the from the business leaders direction is unclear? Or something lower-level? I was picturing the former in the above convo.

Scrum. It has nothing built-in for reflection and planning. It assumes you magically know everything already and can build and demonstrate progress towards the goal at the end of the sprint.

Adding any action to check if you are on the right track helps. Scrum doesn't have any, it assumes the development is subservient to the PO, and the PO is that flawless being that does everything perfectly, even when nobody tells him he has to do it. It also and adds a lot of confusing tasks that distract the PO from this one main goal.

Thus, the odds of a team knowing where they are going reduces drastically if they start doing scrum.

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