[zbuc]

I prefer the "getting shit done" methodology.

Find the least amount of process necessary to get your work done and make sure everyone knows what's going on and has reasonable expectations.

It's honestly not hard to do this, and you don't need a crazy methodology to do it.

[anthonyb]

Er, that's pretty much Scrum in a nutshell :)

[vladvlad]

Not in my experience, no. In fact, it's pretty nearly the farthest thing from the getting shit done thing I've actually dealt with.

Just getting shit done doesn't mean bullshit arbitrary time-slices, half-day postmortems at the end of said timeslices, insertion of "project managers" who know little to nothing of either the actual business problem being address or the technical means used to address it, people working on a parallel svd implementation having to explain their work daily to web designers, blah blah blah.

The whole thing is a money making cult for the people who invented it, and a means of empowering a class of employees (project managers) who should exist only in very small numbers, if at all.

The claim seems to be that if you don't use scrum, you will just end up doing some horrible waterfall. This is a false dichotomy.

[ricardobeat]

As naive as this comment seems, it's mostly true. Scrum is just a packaged set of practices intended to ease adoption of the agile philosophy. The end goal is to minimize process and maximize communication, which is exactly the same as "get shit done".

[anthonyb]

Thanks - I think...

[zbuc]

That's the end goal, unfortunately there are plenty of cargo cultists that don't really understand it and think the process is the important part.

I've worked on scrum teams before, it can be done well if no one takes it too seriously IMO. Once you start guilting the team over the artifacts of scrum, it's fallen apart and become a detriment to your goal of Getting Shit Done.

[vladvlad]

This is the no-true scotsman argument. I have yet to see scrum implemented in a way that wasn't taken too seriously, that didn't make the team's life harder, etc, etc. It's just too easy to say they're all doing it wrong, if it's almost always done wrong.

Maybe the reality is that it only works for some kinds of programming, when not taken too seriously. But then why bother at all?