The way people who aren’t satisfied with Scrum are treated is classic blame the victim mentality.

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The way people who aren’t satisfied with Scrum are treated is classic blame the victim mentality. The true believers and the people with buy now buttons on their books and courses just tell you that you did it wrong. And if you give us $20k for a few days of our time, we’ll whip your team right into shape.

Question: how do we improve if we’re convinced what we’re doing is perfect?

I was always put off by how prescriptive the Agile folks were. Just calling it Agile invited people to ask “What, you’re not Agile?” if you were to say you weren’t a convert.

It’s sort of like communism. No matter how many times it fails while starving and killing people, there are people out there waiting to say it just wasn’t implemented correctly yet.

I’m not, by the way, coming out against Scrum here. I think it can work well in proper circumstances. I mainly want to say there are circumstances where it fails when done properly.

My first experience with it was when a friend of mine told me how he was working 60-hour weeks because their project managers were treating the stories as deadlines. Before anyone corrects me, I know this isn’t how Scrum is supposed to work.

I was then concerned when a company I worked for hired a Scrum coach. He started diagramming workflows with little dollar signs at each step, and people were commenting about how the Scrum one looked like a processor pipeline.

Given that history, I came into it biased. I ended up finding it can work. The biggest problems I usually observed related to how business organizations treat software engineering. Management can’t seem to help themselves from looking at a sprint’s worth of stories, mentally marking them as done in 2 weeks, and then expecting it.

I got pretty good at asking product managers to sacrifice stories that weren’t started yet if they had last minute requests to insert during the sprint, but I rarely saw true respect for letting all of the work go through the process.

The whole point was to empower developers. Given that organizations write the paychecks, it seems the opposite may have happened. We just ended up giving more granular control to the organization.

Basically, something like Scrum won’t work without the organization truly buying in. I always thought of it as the organization getting more input but less power. I suspect the people making money selling Scrum don’t emphasize that while asking for the checks.

Our industry’s deciding whether something really is the cure for all that ails us seems to be quite subjective. I don’t know if there’s any other true way to measure it because all projects are different.

I’m fairly convinced that a team who really wants to make something work will, regardless of how miserable it may make them in the process.

We too often correlate a team’s success with having used the method. I suspect in the end the work ethic of the team and its ability to collaborate properly are still the main drivers of success.

Now, having said it can work, I have a philosophical issue with the mentality behind Scrum. It seems to be an attempt at Taylorism. I get that businesses need to have an idea of where the product stands, but I often chuckle at how the pulling numbers out of your ass phase gets treated as some sort of science with all of its charts. Each problem is different.

Scrum is an admission that what we do is assembly line work. Seeing how fast we can bang out memorized solutions seems to serve a different goal than some of us had when getting into this field in the first place. I don’t remember speed at banging out pictures as something we’ve celebrated in the great artists.

I’ve been quite taken with the philosophy Clojure brings to the table, and I was quite impressed by Rich Hickey’s idea of hammock driven development. He spent years on his hammock thinking through Clojure. How often do you hear of people taking time to think in this industry anymore?

I think the incrementalism and fail fast, cheap, and often mentality has clouded our ability to think on a larger scale.

I think our treating our work as assembly line work has gotten us exactly what we asked for. We’re treated as commodities because we treat ourselves as commodities. If we even among ourselves say we’re doing piece work on an assembly line, why do we expect respect from anyone else? I’ve often said developers often have the potential to get to the top of the bottom of the totem pole in an organization. We’re that floor full of different people who will never go anywhere.

Are we an art or a craft? I suspect it’s both, but I fear those treating it as a craft have mostly won.