Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to speculate on why, if Scrum is so bad, everyone uses it?

Is it because everyone is an idiot (e.g. management)? Or for some nefarious reason? Or maybe it isn't actually that bad?

On one project I was on, there was a contractor company billing millions per year to create a React admin tool frontend. Many developers involved, Scrum master full-time, and so on. Tickets were created for small parts of features, of course not considering anything more than 2 weeks ahead due to agility, then later other tickets would be created for the next phase of the feature so everything that had been done so far had to be thrown away as it was wrong (great for billable hours), etc.

The person on the customer's side managing this didn't really know what they wanted, so was happy to be told that, due to agility, they wouldn't have to specify anything more than two weeks ahead. A big decision can't be wrong if you aren't allowed to make big decisions! Can't get fired for decisions being wrong if you aren't allowed to make them.

So everyone won out of this situation really.

I don't know if there would have been a better way to manage this project. But I can see what everyone got out of it.

Because Developers are not the only stakeholders. Management and marketing needs to know when the next release will be. In a complex project it doesn't matter if you are ready to go with your part if someone else just merged in a new feature that is crash prone in situations they didn't think to test. In a complex project you may also depend on hardware being delivered at the same time. In a complex project there may be people planning when they can safely role this out to their system.

Agile works great for a small project where a few developers is all you need. However few in the agile manifesto seem to have thought about how to scale it to larger projects. That isn't to the manifesto is wrong - it very much fixes some real issues with previous project management. However some of those real issues were an intelligent response (not to be confused with good!) to even more complex issues that you cannot ignore just because they are causing issues.

Scrum is one of the few that thought about the large project problem, and so it appears at first you can scale it to larger projects. However now that we have tried it for a while I can safely conclude it isn't a great fix. I'm not even convinced Scrum is better than waterfall (waterfall has iterations - version 1.0, 2.0...), though scrum and waterfall get different things wrong with project management.

Of course the next question you should be asking is how do you manage a large project. I do not have an answer. I haven't even seen evidence that anyone has found a good answer despite many smart people facing the problem and thus thinking about it.

Management and marketing needs to know when the next release will be and what will be in it. Cutting things up into two week segments, and religiously opposing any attempt to plan together as group or come with rough schedules undermines engineerings ability to interact meaningfully with those people.

Sales people, investors, and customers really don't care about how good you are about meeting your scrum targets or how many fictional story points you're able to get through.

It's also possible that we have forgotten what anything else can look like.

For me, I'm a senior technical leader now and my entire professional career has been Agile and Scrum. I haven't been exposed to other techniques.

Better not upset the apple-cart, we all know how it works, and besides, it's the defacto for a reason... right? (this is tongue in cheek but to be fair, I make decisions like these subconsciously all the time; "why do CI/CD", "Why use GIT as SCM", "Why do peer review/MRs" --- because I always have and it seems good enough on the surface)

> It's interesting to speculate on why, if Scrum is so bad, everyone uses it?

Scrum is bad (as implemented by bigcorp), but waterfall is worse (as implemented by bigcorp).

A simple example from my past. My team was scrum based in a bigcorp that mostly did waterfall, so of course we did scrum badly too. That said, our scrum team shipped a major integration feature in two sprints (4 weeks) that the partner integrating team inserted into a 14 month long waterfall release train. It took ~16 months to ship a feature to customers that took 4 weeks to build and internally validate.

If there had been less bigcorp bullshit said feature might have taken 3 days, but at least 4 weeks is better than 14 months, although in this case customers got the worst of both.

Because it purports to make progress predictable, and measurable, which for the PMs and managers is very important.

It’s a combination of cargo culting (nobody ever got fired for using Scrum!) and consultants who use it as a form of leverage to extract billable hours from their clients.

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