| To go through some of the points I fundamentally disagree with:
"There is no place for an actual senior engineer on a Scrum team" - There absolutely is, who is peer reviewing the code, working with the BAs to design the architecture, identifying the technical dependencies in the backlog? Scrum is not a methodology for writing code, it is for getting a series of tasks done. All the things a senior dev needs to do on top of code can be broken into tasks, Scrum adds a weekly "is this still the most important set of things to be doing?" meeting into the mix. "It's aggressively short-term, by design" - The whole post talks about 6 week projects. Scrum is terrible for that as it imposes far too many meetings. Scrum works for the complex space where you say "12-36 months" as your gut feel estimate. It is a reaction to the waterfall world where you'd discover 2 years in you weren't building what the business wanted. "It has no regard for the programmers' career needs or desires" - Stories make for excellent opportunities for juniors to "own" bits of work from initiation to completion. Old school projects provided very little opportunity for juniors to work on requirements gathering and thus a big chicken and egg problem for promotion. It also offers plenty of opportunity to interact with your customers, which is almost always a good way to get promoted. "The story points are there to track productivity" - Oh noes the people paying you want to know how long the project is going to take to be done. The talk of many status meetings seems decidedly anti-Scrum and is an excellent example of the sort of thing that people should be screaming about in retrospectives. "It punishes R&D" - Ironically it can be a really useful opportunity to conduct R&D. Scrum makes you have something measurable and a time frame in which to conduct it, which makes for an easier sell than an open ended request. I think what annoys some is when they get shut down too quickly, or are forced into taking a less technically interesting approach that delivers enough business value. Scrum isn't there for pure research into the theoretical, but then no-one is claiming it is. Killing businesses - Much like every tabloid headline everything can kill you. Value destroying mergers exist in abundance, and poor leadership/management is a real killer. Plenty of companies do very well out of Scrum, especially when they are in a cost centre environment. I might sound rather "no true Scotsman" when it comes to Scrum but there are only a few things you need to do to be "doing Scrum". What it does give you is a powerful question to ask, and a regularly mechanism to raise it via the retrospective - "why are we doing X when it isn't in Scrum?". |
0_0 Y...you didn't just write that, right? I'll be unusually charitable and give you a chance to think again about that sentence up there.
> "The story points are there to track productivity" - Oh noes the people paying you want to know how long the project is going to take to be done.
And yet, points aren't supposed to be translated to time intervals..... (Spoilers: in practice, they are.)