Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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I've been doing "agile" since before "Agile" was a thing, and I am a Scrum.org certified PSM. I don't need to go read anything to know that you're misrepresenting the situation here.

But to indulge you, here's what scrum.org says, in part:

If you are just getting started, think of Scrum as a way to get work done as a team in small pieces at a time, with continuous experimentation and feedback loops along the way to learn and improve as you go.

Continuous experimentation, adapting with feedback, and learning and improving as you go? That doesn't sound like "process over people" to me.

Note also that the Agile Manifesto never says anything about not having some process. I think almost everybody would agree that a certain amount of process for the sake of consistency is a Good Thing. The problem is when people over-elevate the process to where it's seen as its own end unto itself, rather than a tool to help the team deliver the $THING they are trying to deliver.

I agree a small amount of process is a good thing. It needs to be small enough so that people won't be squashed by it, so they won't stop thinking and act correctly in whatever situation the process didn't cover.

As someone who was doing waterfall projects back in the day and lived through various agile variants, I don't think the amount of process that scrum involves is justifiable. At least waterfall produced tons of documentations which made projects rock solid. With scrum you do all these crap rituals and you are left with nothing but depressed engineers. And no, an "energizer" is not going to help.

I've seen plenty of times were scrum was added to organizations (even to teams that were working incredibly well without it) with horrific results. In one case, developers just started quitting (me included).

I'm glad one of my client is walking back on scrum, even though there are still a few zealots trying to do scrum without calling it scrum, no matter the pushback they receive from everyone else.

There are definitely some good ideas coming out of scrum (the product backlog is a great concept) but as a whole it's definitely a net negative for morale and productivity.

I respect the hustle of the scrum masters who managed to create the most useless job role I've ever seen, though.

Hey kids,

Do ya love sprinting? Wanna never stop?

Wanna play with cards shouting numbers with no meaning not unlike old ladies playing Bingo?

Wanna have a mini CEO, who, for some reason bosses around people far more qualified than themselves, implying that they are just nerds that can't be trusted to speak to the outside world?

Wanna appoint one of your team members each week (or, even better, hire a dedicated member of your team) to whine about you adhering to all of the rules you just made up?

If you love all of the above, you'd love Scrum. And, if your idea of good time is being in meetings about meetings, you'd love SAFe even more.

> If you are just getting started, think of Scrum as a way to get work done as a team in small pieces at a time,

The reality is that if you are just getting started, think of Scrum as a way to talk about work and have rituals about work, preventing you from doing actual work. I have never, in my long career, seen Scrum work. Unless your idea of it working is chasing away good developers and making the mediocre ones thrive (in following the process, not in actual achievements).

Scrum is just terrible and should be killed with fire.

SAFe should absolutely be nuked from orbit. But Scrum done right works very well. The thing is, most of your strawman items listed above are not intrinsic to Scrum.

Take the "playing with cards" thing for example. "Planning poker" is not an intrinsic element of Scrum. Despite the practice being nearly ubiquitous in shops that claim to be using Scrum, it's really an outside idea that got pulled in.

Don't believe me? Check the Scrum Guide[1] and see if you see any mention of planning poker. Or for that matter, Jira - another thing people often criticize in regards to Scrum, despite it also not actually being part of Scrum. Velocity is another thing that people love to rail against (and rightly so) that isn't part of Scrum.

[1]: https://scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2020/2020-Scrum-Gui...

And then one authors of the book state: "if you know nothing about Scrum, implement everything as in the book, otherwise adapt to the situation and the team. If not you will surely fail [...]"

But being "Scrum.org certified PSM", how do you see your colleague from scrumalliance.org?

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