Why I Quit the Scrum Alliance
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2024
- After a transformative 15-year journey with the Scrum Alliance, David Scott Bernstein shares why he chose to pivot away and towards core technical practicces. This video delves deep into the fundamental issues with Scrum practices, exploring how they often diverge from Agile's core principles and overlook technical excellence. David provides a candid reflection on the sustainability challenges in software development under Scrum, highlighting how Agile technical practices, such as Extreme Programming, addresses these issues by prioritizing craftsmanship and precision.
If you're an experienced software developer disillusioned with traditional Scrum's limitations, or if you're seeking ways to enhance your Agile practices, this discussion will equip you with insights to consider a shift towards more robust and effective methodologies. Join David as he dissect the paradoxes within Scrum and advocate for a return to the roots of Agile, where integration of technical excellence isn't just beneficial-it's essential for advancing your coding craft.
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- Have questions, suggestions, or ideas? Share your thoughts in the comments below. I'm excited to hear from you!
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Thanks for putting this out there. Coming originally from XP, I agree completely that Scrum has put out some important ideas but ultimately the failure to include development practices has let so many to have mixed results and we need a different drum to beat
Thank you for your support. It is much appreciated!
I see some elephant carpaccio behind you. Long live small vertical slices!
Yes, that’s the elephant in the room and it has been vertically sliced. Thank you for pointing that out!
The great enemy of time-boxing is the manager who demands that the dev team incorporate his desired change or new feature near the end of the sprint. If you have to live with one of these management types you should consider changing to Kanban.
Yeah, I’ve seen Scrum abused and misused by managers in many ways including changing the Sprint Goal in the middle of the sprint.
First of all thank you for putting this thought out there. I think what you're getting at is that scrum is not a holistic practice that covers the upstream and downstream practices that are completely essential.
The "forcing function" is not functioning, because it's just easier to compromise on the principles. I do believe that for all the problematic scenarios that are mentioned there are existing solutions, as I'm certain you are aware, but not necessarily competency within the non scrummaster roles to address them. So in that sense I think scrum makes a false promise, that by hiring a scrummaster you can have an agile team. I don't think most scrummasters have the knowledge or skills to coach product owners and devs on implementing practices that will allow them to achieve agile values, or to operate successfully within scrum methods without compromising.
You are very welcome! I agree, Scrum Masters do not have the skills to coach software developers on how to write extensible code. Most developers do not know these skills and so those projects become challenged. My problem with the Scrum Alliance is that they are in complete denial of this and constantly deprioritize and devalue the people who actually do the work. They do not know and they do not want to know that technical practice are integral to successful software development with Scrum and that is a BIG PROBLEM for everyone doing software development with Scrum. But I’m not just about pointing out problems. I have real solutions that I share on this channel so stay tuned and thank you!
Sadly, I think the origin of much of this was the displaced traditional IT Project Managers moving to scrum masters and product manager roles as careers paths. Their frame of reference and default mode is “managing resources”, and managing “hand-offs”. Since most of these folks (In my experience) are not very technical, all they can really do is “manage resources” and “get requirements”. From my experience, this is where it started falling apart. Some of the cause is also us devs. Some of us absolutely hate maintaining code and happily prefer “handing it off” to some other “operational” team instead of “running what you build”. These hand-offs introduce significant process latency, creating interdependent teams that result in little if any benefit to the business. In such cases, the teams might as well return to good ‘ole traditional IT processes. At least expectations would be better aligned.
I know I sound like I am being critical of traditional PM trying to move to a newer role, but I am really trying to just criticize the observed tendencies for those folks to apply their comfortable traditional approach to scrum/agile and effectively remove most of its benefits. Seems kind of pointless and is certainly confusing a lot of people.
You bring up an excellent point. This has been my experience as well. When traditional project managers become Scrum Masters many keep acting as project managers instead of servant leaders because that’s their ‘mode’ of working. I also agree that us devs can be part of the problem because most of us were never taught that there are ways of building enterprise software without incurring technical debt. It’s not our fault because these skills are generally not known but building software without incurring technical debt is not only possible but very doable. I’ve worked on projects where the teams had these skills and projects where the teams didn’t have these skills. The former gets better results.
Thank you for your continued drive to make software development more effective and better.
You are very welcome and thank you for making Seattle a leader in software craftsmanship. You guys are awesome!
I've heard this argument time & time again, in one way or another from other working Scrum Masters, and they were frustrated.
Thank you for your comment. I agree, there’s a lot of frustrated people on Scrum teams. All of the Scrum literature says that Scrum is incomplete by design and in order to use Scrum for software development you must employ other frameworks. But that is not what the Scrum Alliance teaches Scrum Masters. They say and imply that all you need to do is follow the Scrum Guide and everything will work out. That’s not how I’ve seen Scrum play out in dozens of organizations over the last two decades. As a top consultant I get the inside story at many top organizations that I’ve worked with and I see problems everywhere. These are big problems but there are solutions.
I also wanted to thank you, Katherine. My UA-cam stats tell me that 100% of my viewers are male. To solve these important challenges we need everyone so I wanted to thank you and everyone who isn’t a ‘white guy like me’ because your unique perspective is what we need to move forward. I’m excited to share everything I know on this channel.
thanks for this video. I found over time the question being asked of me 'do you do / can you do agile / scrum' in a variety of roles and contracts. When I studied the agile manifesto and its core principles however I could not fail to notice a distinct difference between my understating of its core principles and the way it was and is being implemented. More over I had to see that agile and scrum are seen as management tools by many. The freedoms and radical nature of agile I implement myself and in my own work and this is successful, so I find it difficult to understand how agile has become what it is right now typically in the work place.
Thank you for the comment. I agree that Agile and Scrum have diverged from their original intention. There’s still a lot of value in them but many people have distorted them and, as you say, turned them into a management tool, including and especially the very organizations who are popularizing (and profiting from) them.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Thank you, Michael. I know you see the challenges too. Let’s do what we can to fix them!
I really respect your decision. Thanks for sharing the story behind it.
Thank you for your support. It means the world to me!
I can affirm your views from my own experience in application development within the enterprise context. It's become a religion on it's own, cherry picking the most superficially observable characteristics, a new cargo cult. Most scrum masters lack a sufficient appeciation of hard skills such as technical dependency management which is key for enterprise contexts where 20 different systems are impacted for trivial features.
Thank you for your feedback. I agree. And I understand there is a knowledge gap between technical and nontechnical people in software development but Scrum has only widened that gap. I am really relieved to be out.
Become? It was always a religion.
@@BryonLapemore like a cult
I enjoyed your analysis ❤
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Andy Hunt put it well, "The agile manifesto establishes abstract principles for skilled practitioners in a healthy environment. But novices can’t apply such abstract principles directly, they have to start with unambiguous, context-free, concrete rules." Beyond novices, there are many people who abhor uncertainty and simply want to be told what to do -- including how to "do Agile." Enter the consultants, the gurus, the methodology wonks, and it was all downhill from there.
Wow, I’ve been trying to understand what is at the root of the challenges in the software industry. I think you hit on one of the big ones-people want to be told “what to do” or how to do Agile ‘right” but Agile is all about responding in the moment, not creating a bullet-proof plan. Thank you for the insight. I totally agree.
I’ve found (or felt, to be more accurate) that the demand for “what to do” and “how to do” are most often born from having managers that give horrible feedback for developers that didn’t do exactly what the manager had in their minds (and only in their minds). Being exact, to that often unattainable point, requires a detailed specification with all aspects considered and pre-planned. With “the game” rigged in such a way, there’s no incentive to try and be agile… not unless the top levels really embrace agility…
I’ve always been a SCRUM advocate. This has been great for bite size features and bug fixes.
However I’m now hitting what you have described.
The size of the features have increased despite trying our best to reduce them down to SPRINT-size. The ceremony now is often a hinderance.
I’m really looking forward to more content from someone who wants this to better.
Thank you. I’ll be releasing a new video every week to address how we can overcome the challenges from Scrum and sustainably build better software. Stay tuned!
I reject Scrum...and SAFe....
Yeah, SAFe is worse than Scrum on ignoring the core technical practices. It is seriously damaging industry! Wow, how did the world end up in this situation?
Well as always. Good principles get corrupted by people wanting control without the skills or even basic understanding and wanting to pay as little as possible for it. We are left with managers with no IT skills managing junior devs and calling it SCRUM. A recipe for disaster which incidently explains really well all the BS "junior position with 10 years of experience" job postings.....
Btw I don't even think it is the scrum master's role to "protect the team", that's the lead's role imo. A scrum master ideally should be on the same footing as the devs, as you said, and have little to do with the hierarchy outside of the team itself. .
Yes, I think there are good principles in Scrum that can get corrupted by people who don’t understand the nature of software development. In some companies it can be really bad. I hope we can return to the roots of Agile and find its benefits again.
Manager: So... I can hire a bunch of juniors and get them to produce product?
Agile guy: What? No, that's not what this is about, you can't -
Manager: I can't hear you, I'm too busy hiring juniors. Oh man, the money I'll save!
Yup, and those are the same managers who fire their devs and replace them with AI only to find that AI without guidance will run their business into the ground. It is so shortsighted.
👏
Thank you.