Emperor's New Scrum... iteration 1

Fri 27 August 2010

I've been wading through the literature on Scrum/Agile/Lean/Kanban/Hokey-kokey for months now, and I'm still no nearer to making sense of it...

How on earth can folks seriously believe that the whole commercial world should turn itself upside down so programmers can have an easy life?

No job titles, no job specs, no appraisals, no project managers.... just the fully empowered team, sprinting along (at a sustainable pace) with its servant Scrum Master sweeping the path ahead....

it's like a branch of the moonies especially for coders.

Reset your chips a second, guys, and imagine how this sounds in the real world...

  1. A whole movement named after a play in the game of rugby. You don't even UNDERSTAND rugby. Why not call it Sack, or Touchdown? Or you could stick with acronyms - what about Software Chaos Ridiculously Under Managed?
  2. The team (PIGS) are distinct from customers (CHICKENS) based on an awful joke? for real? and the idea is that the team is "committed" but everyone else is just "involved"? that's interesting.... who pays the team salaries? ...would you take potato peelings instead?
  3. The team (no team leader, no project manager) decides for itself how much work it's willing to commit to deliver. how magnanimous! strangely, where i come from, customers dictate. I know they get it wrong a lot of the time, but it seems to me that the folks with the MONEY are in charge, and developers work to get the MONEY. no?

To be fair, I'm not against everything I've read - there are some sensible ideas here, like transparency, agreed definition of done, timeboxing, etc. But many of these have been around with different names for a long time.

As an end note, I confess I chuckled to read that the assembled luminaries on the first Certified Scrum Developer Course failed pretty dramatically. Note the apparent age/experience of the team.

Reminded me of that old saying...

If you can't Do ....

Teach...

and if you can't Teach....

Consult.

Does Apple use Scrum?

I don't think so.