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Ask HN: Do we need to revisit Agile/Scrum?

by paperplaneflyr on 8/27/23, 9:25 AM with 23 comments

• by i_have_an_idea on 8/27/23, 11:54 PM

  Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticise. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of a particular scrum deficiency and there's always some Scrum Expert that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real scrum" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.

  At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.

• by richliss on 8/27/23, 10:11 AM

  Yes, but the problem is that the organisations will only listen to McKinsey and they have a motivation to not solve the problem but to merely adapt it and bill the client again.

  Agile is one of the few significant shifts in business where the board members are unaware of the creators and don't hire them in to consult authentically. I think only Kent Beck was hired by Facebook at a somewhat senior level, and Ken Schwaber spoke at Google a couple of times for mega money. It really should be a thing where every manifesto signatory is a consultant to big business at board level.

• by SideburnsOfDoom on 8/27/23, 9:45 AM

  My related comments recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37233790

  To your question:

  - It depends on what you mean by "Agile"

  - If you want to make sense of "original Agile", read "The Agile manifesto" (2001), it's 2 short pages, we can wait for you to get back.

  - Criticisms of modern "agile" are actually the same as the problems that spawned that agile movement in the first place. It has become what it reacted against.

  - There are practitioners of OG Agile still around and talking / Writing. Dave Farley for one.

  - The scientific method does not need to be replaced, hard no. An experimental, incremental, iterative, learning framework is the way forward. The specific rituals of Jira-based scrum, those could go and not much of value would be lost.

  If you're looking for a new framework, are you familiar with the Accelerate book? How about Team Topologies ? The Goal ?

• by paperplaneflyr on 8/29/23, 9:28 AM

  Looking at most comments, you have people on one side accepting the Agile/Scrum to keep the project moving forward, not dwelling into to much details of the process while accepting delivery is most important.

  On the other side, you have people calling the original Agile manifesto accurate theoretically.

  My take on this right now is: yes, we have come long way with Agile/Scrum/(or any process), built incredible software, billed the customers and always accommodated customer changes. We have come from daily standups to online sitdowns(something I just coined or was it there already :) ). People are hearing more voices then seeing faces. Literally, everyone is screaming AI in every enterprise.

  Given so much data that exists about Agile/Scrum implementations and we have ways to measure it, I believe if someone comes up with a new idea which keeps the core idea of efficiently delivering new software to customers then I am ready to follow that. Just for a change.

• by flappyeagle on 8/28/23, 1:23 AM

  The problem with real life implementations of scrum is: managers apply it in order to get poor performing teams to deliver.

  This does not really work as it does not address the root cause of poor performance, which can vary greatly.

  It’s never worked.

• by buzzlightyear on 8/27/23, 9:48 AM

  Personal experience is that although agile and scrum are widely used, most organisations use these as frameworks to build a custom approach. Biggest problem I always find is lack of accounting and governance transformation to support agile, these two are always typically waterfall, so then you end up with agile technologists versus waterfall business = waterfall with sprints. For agile to really work, every part of a business needs to adopt it, from board down.

• by pylua on 9/2/23, 7:28 PM

  Yes. There is really no way to deliver fixed scope and fixed timeline/cost efficiently which is really what companies are looking for.

• by SideburnsOfDoom on 8/27/23, 3:06 PM

  Let me ask you: Do you think that Agile/Scrum is not being re-evaluated / revisited by anyone at present?

• by t312227 on 8/27/23, 2:59 PM

  hello,

  in my experience, agile/scrum is great - in theory.

  in "the wild"/in practices its mostly implemented in a way, which "pleases lower & upper mgmt" but doesn't take into account the features necessary for the team(s) to be able to work smoothly.

  so: not agile/scrum need to be revisited, but the implementation of agile processes / scrum in companies/projects etc...

  cheers, t.

  ps.: and lots of companies want to do "scrum" with far to few people / small projects - mostly situations, where imho. kanban with a backlog would be sufficient and especially more effective.