"Stop Doing Scrum, Scrum Is A Cancer"

Are you using scrum let's say you are a scrum master or you have been learning it or maybe you are even teaching it and you saw this and be like 'What is this?' or more aggressively 'What the heck is this person saying?'. Program managers and founders who wants to use scrum might want to stick around.

Well, to begin with, these words aren't mine, in fact, they are the words of Mr. Santiago a machine learning expert at ml.school who has been writing software for over 25 years. Let me quote him completely for you to hear what he have to say about Scrum.

"Scrum is a cancer.

I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does.

Some anecdotes:

1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game.

2. If you want to be more efficient, you must add process, not remove it. They had us attending the "ceremonies," a fancy name for a buttload of meetings: stand-ups, groomings, planning, retrospectives, and Scrum of Scrums. We spent more time talking than doing.

3. We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention.

4. We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit in a sprint.

5. I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software.

6. We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points."

7. Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this.

8. Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously.

9. We paid people who told us whether we were "burning down points" fast enough. Weren't story points about complexity instead of time? Never mind. I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile. We brought professional Scrum trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified. We tried Scrum this way and that other way. We spent years doing it.

The result was always the same: It didn't work. Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control. But the best about Scrum are those who look you in the eye and tell you: "If it doesn't work for you, you are doing it wrong. Scrum is anything that works for your team."

Mr Santiago did express his mind and he went on to say in his comment that

"Scrum is like communism. It fails everywhere, every time, but they tell you 'you aren’t doing it right.'”

This is precisely what I've heard from Scrum proponents my entire career. We offered money to many of them to teach us the right way. We always ended up in the same exact place.

Let us stop for now at least anyone can decipher what Mr. Santiago was trying to point out when he said all that.

I think this his point is subjective and objective and it may be that when he said the scrum master employed ended in the same exact place I feel that it may be that no investigation was made. The scrum master should have investigated and tested whether scrum is the right framework for his team to use. I have many more views but I would love it if you could drop your view about what Mr Santiago has pointed out.

I am an aspiring project manager yet to really experience what scrum really feels like and that's one of the main reasons why I can't say whether Mr Santiago is right or wrong about scrum, dont forget that these are my views.

IS MR SANTIAGO RIGHT?

Check the post and comments here

#scrum #projectmanagement