Or maybe they suck because the practice itself sucks.
Dare we question the validity of Scrum as a prescription for everyone to follow, irrespective of their situation?
I personally hate standups. They have always felt like an interrogation to me. And if they are first thing in the day, I really don’t remember what was happening the day before, or what I plan to do today, or what my real blockers are. And guess what: there is a-lot more that is important besides one’s “blockers”. For one: Do I really understand what needs to be done? And do I really understand how best to do it?
Standups reflect the narrative that programming is like sports (“Scrum”), or like a fighter squadron (Jeff Sutherland’s analogy). It is not.
Effective programming requires calm, and deep thought. And then execution. And then stepping back, and thinking deeply; and then some discussion, and then a return to focused and calm work.
It is not a shouted “Hooaah!” and rush to our desks. It is not sound bites in a standup. It is not people huddled around, passing a keyboard back and forth. Some people can work that way surely, but that is not the norm.
And there is a myth that everyone on a team needs and wants to know what everyone else is working on. They don’t. They need to have an awareness of how everything fits together, but they don’t need a daily update of each person’s work. Instead, it is more valuable to have a weekly in-depth discussion of how the software works end-to-end.
There are alternatives to Scrum. Here’s one: think for yourself. That is Agile. Scrum is not Agile. Think about your team, and define a process that is effective for you, and continually revise it. Devise Lean metrics that assess the kinds of progress that you want to achieve.
Forget Scrum. You will be free of its baggage, and you will realize that for the first time, you are in control, and able to drastically improve your team’s effectiveness.
Check out one of Dave Thomas’s talks about how prescriptive methodologies (like Scrum) have ruined Agile, or my own article about that.
