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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

When Ken trained me on Scrum, he was very clear about the fact that Scrum in and of itself was not sufficient for project success. Scrum punts a large number of important decisions to the "Project Owner," and therefore it is a very poor fit with projects that don't have an active,hands on project owner or proxy for the project owner.

if you have a incoherent project owner whose priorities drift from sprint to sprint, you will end up with a beautifully executed, disciplined execution of an incoherent product.

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Scrum forces the client to decide which features are most important. It bribes them with the idea they can have some things next week to avoid a death march 6 months from now. This helps to create useful products without wasting time building useless things.

As long as the most important 80% works chances are the project will be considered useful even if it does not do everything. Which is important but it requires a skilled team to execute well over time.

> Scrum forces the client to decide which features are most important

Aaaaah, I think it's fair to say that Scrum forces the client to declare which features are most urgent and that in the ideal project the client aligns urgency and importance. However, just like real life, it is difficult to align these two orthogonal concepts.

Sometimes things become urgent because they are tantalizingly easy to do.

Sometimes things become urgent because someone important thinks they are important.

Sometimes things become urgent because the client is personally invested in them.

I agree that "as long as the most important 80% works chances are the project will be considered useful even if it does not do everything," but I am cautious about assuming that just because you ask the client to name the most important features ona sprint-by-sprint basis that you will agree in hindsight that the most important 80% of a product got done.

> if you have a incoherent project owner whose priorities drift from sprint to sprint, you will end up with a beautifully executed, disciplined execution of an incoherent product.

Could not agree more with that. And I think that's one of the pitfalls of Scrum: that it works well if you have a relatively well defined project that's not really going to change. If you have to change around your whole system every sprint, nothing is ever going to get done.

Interesting. I thought one of the main advantages of Scrum was to be able to adapt to changing requirements.

From wikipedia: "A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner.As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements."

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