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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone still use Scrum? It seems like a fad that sort of died out 10 years ago.

Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Spotify, many major enterprises, presumably many readers of this article.

Why do you think it was a fad that died out 10 years ago?

Scrum and agile are often conflated but are two different things. Agile is more a set of general principles whereas Scrum(tm) is a specific framework

> Why do you think it was a fad that died out 10 years ago?

Because the last time I heard anyone in my circle of friends (which includes people who work at Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Spotify, etc) mention scrum was more than a decade ago.

I've seen people using some Agile methodologies, but not the Scrum framework.

Oh, so you're going based on a few anecdotes. Well, not even anecdotes, just a lack of mentions.

Its easy to find official blog posts of these companies and other major enterprises describing how they use Scrum, that are much more recent than 10 years ago.

I'm shocked you've never heard of the "Spotify Model" which has been compared to Scrum@Scale. Ask your friend!

The Spotify model is about how people are arranged. It has nothing to do with development methodology or work tracking. From the whitepaper introducing the Spotify model (https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal...):

> [Squads] are a self-organizing team and decide their own way of working – some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches.

And here's a version that's 8 years more recent [1]

> The foundation of the model is the squad and it acts like a Scrum team.

The Spotify model resembles Scrum@Scale which is why I mentioned it. Scrum is a development methodology.

1. https://www.pmtoday.co.uk/spotify-scaling-agile-model/

From your article:

> Each of the squad has complete freedom to choose their agile methodology. So some squad uses Scrum sprints, some use Kanban and some uses mix of scrum and kanban. Sometimes to release early, squads apply the Most viable product (MVP) technique too.

The Spotify model is not related to Scrum. It organizes people. How those people manage their work is not related to how the people are organized. An article explaining the Spotify model in terms of Scrum isn’t a counterexample to that.

> some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches.

Is there only one "The Official" ScrumBan, or can anyone make their own?

It sounds like you are conflating scrum and agile. Lots of companies are still doing agile, few innovative ones (including the ones on this list) are doing scrum. Given that scrum is defined by its very specific rules and quite zealous about “scrum-but” being heresy I don’t think you can count kanban, spotify, or other models as scrum.

Nope, talking about Scrum

Spotify uses agile and some of the teams use Scrum, but not the whole company.

Also, I just talked to my friend who is an Eng manager at Apple, and they said almost no one uses Scrum at Apple anymore. Some teams use some of the methodology, but even those teams got rid of their Scrum masters.

> Spotify uses agile and some of the teams use Scrum

Wait, that contradicts what you just said. Your friend that works there hasn't mentioned Scrum in 10 years!

Thanks for confirming that there are teams at Apple using Scrum, like I said. Dev teams at Apple are pretty insular, I'm surprised your friend knows about what every team is doing! Hopefully we can trust them more than your friend who was wrong about Spotify.

A set of anecdotes are a perfectly legitimate reason to ask a question, which is what they did, after all.

And they may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.

This being a perfect example. Jedberg never heard of Spotify using Scrum "for 10 years" but they'd been using it the whole time, as confirmed by jedberg.

Maybe they've used it so long and are so used to it that they just take it for granted, and that's why they don't mention it any more.

I know for sure that Google doesn't do it and I think many of your other examples doesn't either. Some teams at Google might do it, but it isn't the norm and I didn't see any that did. Many teams do daily stand-ups, but that is about it and even stand-ups aren't that common. There are no sprints etc and I don't think I ever saw the word scrum in any message boards there even.

Spotify Engineering Culture (by Henrik Kniberg)- Part 1 (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GK1NDTWbkY

Spotify Engineering Culture (by Henrik Kniberg)- Part 2 (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzoyryY2STQ

A lot of companies have scrum-masters but practice something other than scrum (agile). They also may be called agile-leads, but in my experience they are identical roles.

The way I have seen the role these days is Agile coach, who teaches the principles of lean and agile as needed and helps teams diagnose problems they are too close to to solve, which is a valuable service. There’s usually one per few hundred people at a company, rather than one per five or so for the scrum master.

I had job where we had an agile coach. First job at of college.. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and pointless. Then they fire the person and replaced them. It was a complete 180. The new person was so good at just coming in sitting down and just listening. Then give some quick advice and things to try. Then leave and then follow back up after a bit and check in. Not everything they suggested worked. But it was extremely helpful.

Huge enterprises love it. At least the ones I've worked at do. It took about the last 10 years for them to get on board, but now it's entrenched.

Scrum allows for granular micro-tracking of developers at a daily level while sanctifying the ideas of developers as interchangeable cogs and that leaderships should be able to move the goalposts at the last minute.

What’s for an enterprise exec not to love?

Well said. It's funny how Scrum was sold to developers as a way to "empower" dev teams, but more often than not it simply encourages micromanagement and poor planning.

I think most of the teams adopt it’s main activities without strictly following the rules. This way, it’s easy to start using, but teams never truly master it and usually start inventing their own heuristics for planning/reviews.

Some large companies, actually invest their time in agile training and contribute to SE process research. From large companies, I can call Ericsson and Spotify (good scrum at scale examples).

I think the problem is that in most companies agile is viewed as something for the developers while the management structures and processes basically remain unchanged.

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