Interesting, from O’Rielly Radar:
The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of “best practices” that some consultant convinced the management to follow.
Endless retrospectives and sprint planning sessions don’t mean squat if the stakeholders never attend them, and too many allegedly Agile projects end up looking a lot like Waterfall projects in the end. If companies won’t really buy into the idea that you can’t control all three variables at once, calling your process Agile won’t do anything but drive your engineers nuts.
Thoughts? I’ve seen scrum done well, and done very very poorly. He’s 100% correct about stakeholders tho.
That’s a very cutting and amusing comment! I guess it can be true if people expect Scrum (or any methodology) to be the silver bullet for them. We are using Scrum in its various levels of purity here. In some cases it has somewhat less-than-succeeded in its application. It’s not entirely at fault though – certain technologies and tool sets are more suited to Agile than others. Has anyone ever been in a place which practices an absolutely “pure” (ie. as prescribed by its inventor) form of any Agile methodology? I can’t say I’ve been in one – usually people tend to pick aspects of Agile methodologies to suit the project and its environment.
I guess my reading of this isn’t “do a pefect form of agile” (or scrum) – it was more around the fact that you can do any methodology – scrum, waterfall, XP, whatever – but if you dont have stakeholder interaction, you are screwed.
Too many places I’ve seen (1st and 2nd hand) tend to lets the PM’s and Dev’s go off and do the agile thing, and the stakeholders just continue as normal, not doing anything different – returning suboptimal results.
Of course, it could be the design (and/or implementation) of scrum where I’ve seen it – if the stakeholders are bored by demos, planning and retrospectives, why would they come? As the team, we need to make it worth their while, but as stakeholders, they need to do their part, too.
I tend to agree with the author….
when people say “Agile” the often means “Whatever we were doing before with scrum like iterations” :)
everyone seems to avoid the hard stuff.