Hello all.
We are in the process of introducing a new form of communism in our team. They call it SCRUMunism. If you are currently practicing this form of communism can you please share your experiences? Is it successful? Are you able to get more done with less? Were you successful in eliminating the middle man?
Agile just can't work in this environment. If everyone participates in the discussions and agrees on everything then there's no-one to blame when things don't work out (which with Agile is usually the case although it's never acknowledged). Without someone to blame others can't advance in a self righteous manner with their now iron-clad proof that they are just better than the idiot that f-'ed up.
I think he called it fake scrum which usually contains other fake elements including:
-the contract game
-Managers
-PMs
-status reports to POs during sprint
-extra back logs
-manipulation of metrics
-introducing new stories mid sprint
-taking stories which are not ready
-no training
-doing waterfall approach when they realize scrum is not working then claim the credit as scrum
-fake PO
The Daily Scrum is a complete waste of time. I meticulously described the work I was doing each day, every day during the Scrum, and the project manager still said he didn't know what I was doing. Is this total incompetence on behalf of the project manager? or is it just that the daily details are too numerous and boring to remember? Bottom line, this is a valueless activity unless it is managed well, if at all - just doing it for the sake of it, is meaningless.
I think Larman has a name for the kind of scrum you practiced. Anybody remembers?
Hands down the worst development experience I have ever been through - offshore developers completely disconnected from the Line of Business, Scrum masters with no authority so every request has to go up the chain. Needing to add a space to a sentence? Write a new story, groom it, deliver it, test it - it is process gone insane.
Was the scrum master / PM the one responsible for creating the stories? What do you mean by she carried the project? Also, how long were the sprints? Finally, what happened after the project was released? Did you stop using it?
OP - Scrum worked fine for us, actually really good, however keep in mind:
the team was on one location, no geographical distribution
the team had similar work hours - we were together all the time
the team was always under 10 team members, total
the scrum master / pm was low drama, high drive - she carried that project
the whole team was located in two conf rooms adjacent to each other
11 month project, incremental go lives, web based app, medium to high complexity, scaled to ~2 million users (we ended up with less than 1.5 m though)
information flow was amazing, there needed to be a ton of planning. major pushes were required when dependencies developed, on average we worked about 45 hr / wk though (we were peaking at 65hr/wk - we had slow 25hr/wk too) - on time and on budget. would do it again - would recommend. hope this helps