(2022-01-22) Jeffries Scrum Rant

Ron Jeffries: A Scrum Rant. A Twitter exchange yesterday and today has given me today’s topic. The Twitter exchange was with Ryan Ripley, with whom I am nearly in agreement.

Ryan started the thread with a good idea: Scrum AND XP, not OR.

I am in violent agreement with this idea. If you follow my work you can guess why: I think that Agile cannot prevail without the Increment (working software). And I also think that XP is a great way to create the Increment and keep it alive.

And … I began by asking “But once you have XP, why do you need Scrum?”

There are two main differences between XP and Scrum:
Scrum requires a ScrumMaster role;
Scrum makes review/retrospective explicit.

If I were condemned to do a software product with a team ever again, we’d be doing a thing that looked like XP plus product and process reflection on a regular cycle. In essence, I’d add “Sprint Review” and “Sprint Retrospective” to XP.

I might start with a regular build-review cycle like a Scrum Sprint or XP Iteration, but I think we’d move quickly to a more continuous flow of development (continuous delivery), using very small stories, and probably single-piece flow, unless the team was larger. I would keep the regular review cycle, just because a meeting every Friday is easier to live with than random meetings on random days

What about the ScrumMaster? Well, if I weren’t doing it myself, I’d like the team to have an XP Coach, with much the same responsibility as an SM, but with a deep understanding of XP technical practices.

Where was I? Oh, right, this is supposed to be a rant. The above was just warmup.

The people in the Scrum Industrial Complex are good people, working hard to help folx who build products. It’s just that–at least for software–they’re doing it wrong (in my very sincere and quite strong view).

the certification and training approach to agile technical skills has failed in the marketplace. They’re still offered but have no wind in their sails, just a few trainers and consultants who keep trying. (see poll below)

So the Scrum Industrial Complex did what anyone with a filing product would do: they gave up.

As a business decision, I’m OK with that

well, in my mind … the Scrum Industrial Complex should be more than a business, it should be a humanitarian effort to bring effectiveness in software development to the world

I hate the fact that they’ve not picked up the ball on this, because they have the money and clout to do it. What they do not have is the wisdom and the will

P.S. Surely societal ills are more important than a little Dark Scrum, unless you see a pattern of exploitation, a pattern of not caring about the underlings.

I responded with a poll: is Scrum certification:

• a market for lemons
• premium-mediocre
• a typical Enterprise product
• all of the above