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Comment by squiffsquiff | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read the article but in response to your comment here:

Scrum is widely used and also widely disliked. I find that apologists for scrum generally excuse the dislike as 'that's not how scrum is supposed to be implemented' - just as you have here. It's exactly the same form of argument you get from apologists for Marxism or Communism when confronted with the widespread dislike for those systems. If something has generally failed wherever it has been implemented, it's not because it hasn't been implemented properly, it's because it is fundamentally broken.

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What I said is much more nuanced. I certainly wouldn't call myself a scrum apologist.

There are good implementations of scrum, and there are teams that like it. In my experience across companies and industries, it's a much larger percentage than unfounded comments like yours and the article would lead you to believe, perhaps 30-40%. Probably due to the SV slant on this site (also why people here always think they know everything). It absolutely has not failed everywhere it's been implemented, and starting from that position is simply incorrect.

My position is that the article (and you) are making incorrect assertions and that you don't even consider that it's a possibility.

Again, your experience is not universal. Stop claiming or thinking that it is and that you know everything. You don't.

I have seen excellent scrum and bad scrum.

I've been on teams where we got to pick what we could deliver in a sprint and utter peace to do it for 2 weeks. Daily scrums were mostly skipped and lasted 5 mins max while we had our morning coffee, standing up.

I've been on a team where "daily scrum" was a 30-60 minute daily Skype call with no agenda, goal or point. The only thing related to Scrum in that company was the terminology, basically a cargo cult.

I've also been on a team that used scrum terms and kinda sorta the process but it was closer to Kanban with releases. But it didn't matter, everyone on the team had 15+ years of experience.

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