Comments on: the cult of scrum

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:32:40 +0000

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.

By: Nic Wise

Nic Wise — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:04:18 +0000

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.

By: Dany Wu

Dany Wu — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:36:16 +0000

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.