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Ah, it has finally happened: the first publication that has declared that Scrum is dead. Apparently, the over-paid consultants have relieved the under-clued bosses of all the money they can, so it's time for the next fad.
Scrum works, of course. Just about any software development methodology works, as long as you have good people working in a disciplined team. If you have a lousy team, adopting the latest fad isn't going to help you.
Iterative development is an old technique. I knew of it as far back as the 1980's, but writing this submission, I see that it has roots much farther back. In software, all the way back to the 1950s. In product development generally, it goes back at least to the 1930's, when Walter Shewhard proposed short "plan, do, study, act" cycles for product improvement.
So: let's take bets. What will the next fad be? TFA says it will be the "open development method". What do Soylentils think the consultants will be selling our bosses in five years?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:11PM
To date in my career I have never seen any correlation between project success and the methodology used for development.
Scrum works, of course. Just about any software development methodology works, as long as you have good people working in a disciplined team. If you have a lousy team, adopting the latest fad isn't going to help you.
Bad management can destroy an otherwise good and functional team and dismantle a project while good management can rarely have a significant positive impact. A very effective tool for even well meaning and otherwise good management is Scrum.
Why? Because good management tends to his/her team in much the same way a gardener tends a garden. Spot the weeds and pull them before they take over the garden and destroy it.
Scrum teaches management that they can fix weeds and turn them into productive plants. Scrum encourages micromanagement. Scrum encourages a work flow that is normally misaligned with work size and scope. Scrum encourages bad developers to game the system so as to appear productive to management while doing nothing.
Scrum is in effect the ideal project management style to overstate the problem space while under delivering while discouraging good management by making them indistinguishable from bad management.
After having been through three successive Scrum disasters I now just turn away projects and organizations that say the use Scrum and Agile methodologies. I also turn down any place that insists I sit in an open office environment.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:20PM
Then you did it wrong three times!
I've directly experienced Scrum applied successfully twice now. The first time I was a newbie and joined a large company in a small but advanced team of exerts who had chosen to adopt and to implement Scrum themselves. The company adopted it, and invested in training. I was working with accomplished, intelligent, industrious people with 20 years more experience than me, It was cross-platform embedded real-time C and C++. Over the next four years we had formal training and we went from doing well to totally ruling.
Unfortunately, management decided that Engineering should be transferred to India.
I got a new, better paying job in a good team of people more my own age who were keen to learn and to do well. I introduced Scrum at the new place, and we went from never delivering any properly-working software to fortnightly tested deliveries of actual working features that we could show to the senior managers, and we kept it up for two years.
This got me a £5k pay rise and "Technical Leader" on my CV.
So, hopefully my anecdote cancels out your anecdote.
The ruthless cost-cutting PHBs came in and ruined that place. I now find myself doing "Fragile/Waterfail" in a very big company...
Scrum works, but you've got to know how to do it, and you've got to commit. As the little green man said," Do or do not. There is no try."
One final thing, though, teams take many months to gel, to work well together. Modern business is such that projects and who's working on what change on a daily basis and PHBs only want things cheaper i.e. corners cut. It doesn't matter what system you use, you are never going to achieve anything of significance in that environment whatever methodology you adopt.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].