Hacker News Reader

It's remarkable how many people hurt themselves and their teams by considering sprint goals as must-complete. "We must complete the work we committed to!"

View on HN

There are so many reasons sprint goals are abused, it can be it bad management culture trickling down, people in charge not understanding even the simplest points of the Agile Manifesto, or even weird companywide KPIs linked to Scrum or Kanban completion metrics that you can so easily pull out of most agile management software (e.g. Jira).

Our scrum lord told us his bonus is tied to these metrics so you can guess why managers and scrum lords behave the way they do in spite of the manifesto. Throw the manifesto out the window its complete bullshit because they say one thing and do another.

Indeed, Scrum looks nice in theory, and can be nice in practice (from my personal experience), because in theory it is about self-organizing of teams and collaboration with the product owner.

In practice however in so many companies it is totally twisted and used as a method of control, and applying pressure, as you said by e.g. making metrics bonus relevant.

"scrum lord"

lol.

Scrum is great when it's run by and for the dev team. As soon as it's co-opted by management as an easy way to 'inspect' performance, as a developer confessional/inquisition, etc, it becomes a living nightmare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com