Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
We use Scrum at work and I have to say, I am pretty annoyed by it. I think it is fundamentally rooted in the idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. And from this come all its micromanagement failure modes (which there are plenty).<p>I think in reality, SW development done right is nothing like that. It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because it takes time and experimentation to come up with the correct way to approach a problem, but if you do it right, you save yourself an incredible amount of time. It&#x27;s more like mathematics, where it takes time to discover that things are actually rather easy (this quote comes to mind <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;micromath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;andrew-wiles-on-doing-mathematics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;micromath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;andrew-wiles-on-d...</a>).<p>Of course, if you look at the project from the longer time perspective, it can appear as continuous production of improvements. But it has a kind of quantum nature, if you decrease the scale of time, you will see less continuity and more discrete bursts of code production. There is something like uncertainty principle that on certain scale, it&#x27;s pointless to try to predict things, because making the correct prediction (which is needed at least to define thing DONE) will take as long as doing the thing in the first place.<p>I don&#x27;t consider myself special, but it is possible that Scrum ruins great minds because they seek conceptual clarity (we sometimes humbly call it &quot;lack of technical debt&quot;). I am not sure how to make that work with Scrum. Perhaps if everything was done three times, punctuated by a team discussion, each time with shorter code.<p>Second thing that I dislike the most about Scrum is that it threw away (or at least &quot;conveniently&quot; renamed) pretty much everything that was ever known about project management. Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) are the biggest loss. (I think it comes from the fact they actually realized the quantum nature of development is a problem.) To me, that is a huge red flag that it is, in fact, a snake oil.<p>P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let&#x27;s have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed.