In Defense of Scrum
Let's not forget from where we began. Waterfalls were not just for scenic hikes.
Rooting for scrum is like cheering for the Yankees, pulling for Tom Brady or being excited when Thanos snapped his fingers.
Disheartening is an emotional under statement when I hear tales of 60 minute stand ups, dead refinement sessions, 34 point stories, micromanaging scrum masters, absent product owners and wilted backlogs. FrAgile and ScrumFall are terms for a reason.
Does your company use scrum as a weapon to micromanage the team? Is scrum just the closest blunt object to inflict trauma on the development team? I hate to be the bearer of bad news but in these cases the management team would just find another tool to do the damage. In these cases, you have a leadership problem disguised as a scrum problem.
So yes, scrum won the project management battle. But is the scrum team losing the war?
In 2024, boring is the best adjective for scrum. At face value it’s a set of simple processes repeated daily. It’s predictable. I call that beautiful. I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world that starts their day eager to run pointing poker. That’s a good thing.
I am thankful for scrum. Scrum is a good-enough process that allows our team to focus on more important and higher value work.
An entire software engineering organization on the same sprint cadence is actually quite a feat of leadership. Management groups that implement consistent schedules across multiple scrum teams should be proud of that accomplishment.
“Story pointing is dumb! Our entire backlog is 3’s, 5’s and 8’s! There’s no point to this!” So say the detractors. Small(er) tickets are the entire premise. It’s hard to appreciate the lack of something because in our scrum team it’s the lack of 13 and 21 point tickets. Story pointing holds the team accountable to break down and refine work until it’s quantifiable. Otherwise, it’s shockingly easy to get lazy on scope breakdown and ticket size. Large and open-ended tickets are difficult to manage and difficult to implement. Having a backlog of small tickets is a feature, not a bug.
Scrum has completely normalized the sprint retrospective. Scrum outlines a reoccurring meeting to give kudos, air grievances and make adjustments. Shame on you if you lay waste to this time.
Now that I am firmly on the management side of software engineering, I have an acute awareness and responsibility to efficiently use company resources and human capital to solve problems. Development teams maximize their value when they’re focused on shipping software. Allowing teams to create snowflake project management systems is a bad decision. It’s just a poor use of time, energy and effort.
Scrum is the lingua franca of software engineering project management. We know it’s far from perfect. Yet, scrum provides enough of a springboard to get started, quickly onboard new team members, share common language with management and offers KPI’s to measure consistency and progress.
Above all else, choose tools and implement processes that are boring, easy to understand and get out of the way from the dev team to build cool stuff. Maybe scrum works for you, and then again maybe it doesn’t. Just know that sometimes the baby needs saved from the bathwater.