A brief list of what Scrum gets wrong
I&#x27;m disappointed that this throwaway list of unsubstantiated bullet points is being treated seriously, but seeing as it is, here&#x27;s &quot;A brief list of what this article gets wrong about Scrum&quot;:<p>1) The author makes the unfortunately all-too-common mistake of confusing agile development with software design. Agile says very little about software design, other than observing that it is incremental and iterative rather than revelatory and monolithic. Scrum, as an example of agile practice, is primarily concerned with implementation and delivery. The Product Owner can consult anyone they want in the course of designing the software, and of course that includes the engineering team. Scrum encourages the PO to seek the participation of all stakeholders in sprint planning and review, but other than that, design is left to the PO&#x27;s discretion.<p>2. Nothing in scrum discourages innovation, and agile certainly encourages innovation to a much greater degree than the detailed spec-driven alternative.<p>3. There is actually a grain of truth to this one, but it confuses what happens within one sprint with the overall process of software evolution over many sprints. What the author is complaining about here is basically Scrum&#x27;s version of YAGNI (&quot;You Ain&#x27;t Gonna Need It&quot;). It&#x27;s the principle of doing the simplest thing that could work first, and then elaborating on it. My 35 years of software development experience tell me that this is a sound approach. Others may disagree.<p>4. Scrum does not require the &quot;dividing every task into small items that can be completed by anyone on the team&quot;. It definitely encourages dividing work into meaningful pieces with tangible, testable results. But nothing prevents a team from matching work with the team members most suited to doing it. The author seems to be complaining about working on a team in general, where the credit for the product must be shared with others. Nothing about scrum encourages &#x27;lack of ownership&#x27; to any greater degree than any other team-based development process.<p>5. This is simply wrong. Scrum encourages modification and explicitly proves the flexibility for it by ensuring that you&#x27;re never more than a sprint away from changing direction if it becomes clear that&#x27;s necessary. And of course, if the team is <i>really</i> blindsided by new information, the PO can cancel the current sprint and start a new one.<p>6. Scrum explicitly encourages self-reflection through the retrospective that occurs every sprint. The author here is apparently ignorant of this aspect, so maybe it was not practiced in his company.<p>7. Scrum requires minimal management. The Scrum Master is not intended as a manager, they are intended as a way to short-circuit bureaucracy so that any impediments to the team&#x27;s progress can be removed. And I&#x27;ve never seen any software development process of any scale that doesn&#x27;t have a Product Owner or a team lead, though the titles may change.<p>8. There are lots of bad tools. Don&#x27;t use them. Find good ones, if you need them. Scrum <i>requires</i> very little, a whiteboard and some sticky notes will do.<p>9. Scrum does not discourage (or encourage) bug fixes or refactoring. As the author notes, that&#x27;s at the discretion of the Product Owner. Again, that&#x27;s always true, whether you&#x27;re using Scrum or some other software management system.<p>10. The Product Owner is responsible for delivering the product on time. Of course they are accountable, and I guarantee that if they&#x27;re at all competent, they&#x27;re doing far more reporting and documentation for their superiors than the team is for them.<p>11. Scrum assumes none of these things. Not a single one. Who has a Scrum Master at every engineering meeting, for instance? Ridiculous. The Scrum Master runs the daily scrum, which is a 15- or 20- minute daily sync up. They don&#x27;t attend any other technical meetings unless someone wants to invite them for some reason.<p>12. Of course scrum points aren&#x27;t meaningless; why would anyone bother to track them if they were? They tell the team what it&#x27;s velocity is, which is useful to the team for sprint planning, and useful to management for resource planning.<p>13. Scrum disempowers the best developers from...what, exactly? Scrum is designed to allow devs to focus on delivering, so they don&#x27;t have to guess at what&#x27;s being requested, and so they get quick feedback on what they&#x27;ve implemented. At all times, they know how they&#x27;re doing. There&#x27;s nothing disempowering about scrum.<p>14. The Manifesto doesn&#x27;t say &quot;no processes or tools&quot;. The scrum process is very light compared to the spec-driven process that it replaced. And as noted above, it doesn&#x27;t require many tools. The fact that people feel like they need ten Atlassian services to do it isn&#x27;t Scrum&#x27;s fault, any more than the fact that you bought a Total Gym and a ThighMaster means that fitness is bunk.<p>15. Any developer who truly believes that &quot;any task that has been done before in software does not need to be redone because it can be easily copied and reused,&quot; and that any new task cannot be estimated, should really find another profession.<p>Honestly, I think the article is a troll. For the author&#x27;s sake, I hope so. If not...well, he says he&#x27;s a Programmer and Dog Owner. I hope he&#x27;s a really good dog owner.