Agile Scrum is not working | Hacker News Reader

Agile Scrum is not working

iism.org

18 pointssigna117 comments

Maybe I was spectacularly unlucky, but in the last twenty or so years working with different companies and teams claiming to do agile, most were focused on the motions and the tools (stand-ups and Jira) as opposed to the spirit and intention.

Agile was and is nearly always used as an excuse to continue to make mid-sprint changes and push more work to the dev teams "because we are agile".

An understanding of the level of support required at the leadership level and the accountability that follows is rarely understood.

Interestingly over the past few years I am seeing more organizations migrate towards an iterative model with monthly cycles, and I've seen this work well with distributed teams with a wide range of roles (dev, UX, validation, tech pub, devops, etc.)

In contrast, I also continue to see true scrum work extremely well with some teams. They are all relatively small (6-8ish) with strong support from the EVPs or C*Os, mostly operating from a single location or timezone, have a good rapport with each other and openness up the chain of command as well as horizontally with the stakeholders.

That, to me has a large cultural component. Some teams can get there, and many won't.

Yeah companies don't change their basic modus operandi just because they bought Agile training.

Add to that problem that most legacy companies are very date driven and you really end up with Date Scrum where the team is pushed to get really anything out by a date. Then tack on people focusing on the parts they like - Agile means I can change things mid project! - the result of which is a scope moving chaos monster that delivers bad software by date certain.

I posted this comment on another Scrum thread, and I think it applies here as well, especially on HN as lots of people on here are actually trying to make something brand new with no customer to iterate with.

>Amplified learning is critical for a startup because you are searching for value in dark space. To find value you have to package up attempts and fire them into the dark space to see if anything hits. Fire the value attempt when it is ready, not when some artificial sprint interval finishes!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23191890

For many projects that I've done that are "agile" the budget seems to go out the window....

What's better-- the right project over budget, or a broken nothing that is under budget?

That right project over budget is clearly what we want! I do claim that teams who have don't have a way to iteratively validate their increment are just going to deliver the wrong thing over budget though.

So Agile Scrum is not working so what you really need is Value Scrum.

Since we are clearly in a post-agile world. There appears to be little added value in reiterating all the reasons people believe that the management of software development is not working. So what is going to replace it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com