Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Is Scrum Still Relevant? (opensource.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In an article titled "Scrum is dead: breaking down the new open development method," Ahmad Nassri writes: "Among the most 'oversold as a cure' methodologies introduced to business development teams today is Scrum, which is one of several agile approaches to software development and introduced as a way to streamline the process. Scrum has become something of an intractable method, complete with its own holy text, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development , and daily devotions (a.k.a., Scrum meetings). Although Scrum may have made more sense when it was being developed in the early '90s, much has changed over the years. Startups and businesses have work forces spread over many countries and time zones, making sharing offices more difficult for employees. As our workforce world evolves, our software development methods should evolve, too." What do you think? Is Scrum still a viable approach to software development, or is it time to make way for a different process?
I can see where it might be useful in certain situations. However, when it gets used with other Agile fluff to simply produce a dirty snowball of design layers with no overall architecture produced, then it becomes a headless snake. It also tends to get misused by management who see it as a way to micro-manage developers thereby pissing off the very developers upon whom they are depending.
... we develop software the old-fashioned way: incremental improvements to an ancient codebase with fundamental flaws in its core that nobody's brave enough to tackle, with irregularly-scheduled releases set into the production server without automated unit testing.
At home I develop in a more refined fashion: diving right in without much prep or research, working on it for weeks to months, then finding that the project is 100 times more complex than I expected and someone else has already done it.
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It's sad how quickly the No True Agile fallacy rears its head in any /. thread that points out how fragile and limited the methodology is.
The core principles are fine:
1) Frequent communication means nobody drifts too far out of scope
2) Breaking a large problem into small problems is something you should have learned before you even started university
3) Gives nervous business stakeholders an insight into the development process
But it doesn't work in most settings for these reasons:
A) The broader business doesn't engage (becomes sprints within waterfall)
B) The engineering organisation doesn't engage (usually because they don't feel they own it)
C) It's too complicated - it's the core principles that matter, not rote adherence or form filling
Too many moving parts; too many new concepts; too many new ways of doing things; for too many people; who aren't necessarily interested and/or sufficiently trained and informed.
You CAN make Scrum work - if and only if - everybody gets on board and you take a large hit up front while everybody adjusts to the transition.
Most businesses can't and won't do this.
"... always going forward 'cause we cant find reverse! "
I can see where it might be useful in certain situations. However, when it gets used with other Agile fluff to simply produce a dirty snowball of design layers with no overall architecture produced, then it becomes a headless snake. It also tends to get misused by management who see it as a way to micro-manage developers thereby pissing off the very developers upon whom they are depending.
Well I've worked on a lot of successful scrum-based projects (full disclosure: I'm a certified scrum master). Done right it's a very effective and enjoyable way to work. But there are some pre-reqs if you are going to succeed.
If you do it right, then you can be very productive and have fun doing it. Unfortunately, there are a lot people who have made half-assed attempts at "agile" and then rubbished it when their projects failed.
I personally found Scrum and Kanban annoying in this respect:
1: The meeting to tell your "stories" is a time-waster when done more than once a week. Daily, it is pointless.
2: The "what you did" scenario. It becomes listing everything, relevant, or non, so your manager doesn't think you are slacking, and pits you against other developers or IT people.
3: The "what you are going to do today" crap. SSDD is the proper answer for that.
4: The "what is blocking". This translates to "point the finger." As a dev, I learned the hard way that "blocking" means a game of "hot potato" where if you or your code can, in -any- way be used as an excuse for others to not do their work, expect to be training a H-1B fresh off the boat to take your job soon. The "blocking" phase turns into a "The Apprentice" boardroom meeting right before someone gets tossed.
As for code quality, look at the garbage coming out on average. People thought waterfall coding was bad... but code quality when that was the main method was, in general, far better than the Scrum based systems, just because Scrum mainly is used to pit devs against each other, as opposed to actually creating something.