|
I'm reminded of the discussions about XP when it was newer. Lotta folks thought XP meant "cowboy away" and then got excited when it invariably didn't work--the original folks said "well, look, you're not doing the process; you can't blame it if you're not doing it". Now the thing is this looks a hell of a lot like a No True Scotsman argument, especially if you're only glancing at it in passing. Yet, boundary setting is a legitimate thing to do; the XP folks had put up their lists of practices, etc. XP is/was very demanding, very tricky to do; it was an open question for a little while whether it was actually implementable by average organizations. The interface with the product owner was a particular issue, and is still in Scrum. Put another way, when you say "Scrum says to do X" (say, very few meetings which should go quickly), and someone goes "Scrum sucks because we're constantly in meetings explaining why we're not getting any work done", and you say "You're not doing Scrum"... you have a point. Scrum teams are not supposed to be crunching; if the product has to ship by date X, then some of the features won't get in, and it's the product owner's _responsibility_ to say which ones those are. If the product owner says "I don't care these are all mission critical we can't discard any of them" then you're not doing Scrum, even if you have some highly educated boob with a certificate from some idiot making them a Scrum Ninja or whatever saying that you are! Now, some of the practices are more important than others, and most of these frameworks say "you kinda need to be flexible, but try it first". So there are grey areas. And sometimes (as with XP) the existence proof that it is even possible to do the process is nontrivial. But kabuki-scrum (thank you, quanticle!) is a real thing. |