Epics, sprint backlog, scrum master, sprint task, velocity, product owner”
If you recognize the above words, it’s highly likely you’ve worked with Scrum. If we may believe the software engineers, agile methods like Scrum would be the best solution to all problems that exist in the world of software engineering.
What is special about scrum is that it is a developing method where products can be built in fixed-length iterations called sprints. Scrum is designed to control processes that requires a high level of flexibility, to meet the changing business needs.
Not everybody experiences scrum the same way and actually a lot people who worked with scrum don’t feel scrum is that wonderful as it seems and want to spread their opinion. They state that:
⁃ There is to little attention for soft skills of scrum (Vandepoel, 2017), which means the social interactions and relationships team members have with each other. Due to fact that the daily stand-ups are focused on progress and results, the social interactions are gone. Especially IT-nerds are not good in showing emotions and feeling emotions from others, which will not improve with scrum.
⁃ Statistics make no sense: progress is measured in terms of velocity, but according to research (Savalle, 2017) employees don’t understand it well and therefore it is not be used in the good way. Which is why less progress can be made.
⁃ Hard to start the scrum-life: scrum contains a lot of new words, as can be seen above, therefore the start of scrum can be tough and can cause conservative behavior amongst employees.
⁃ When implementation is not done well, double work will be done a lot, which is of course the opposite of where scrum is developed for.
Is scrum really a fragile agile method? No, to me it isn’t. Currently, I am working on the BI-department of a bigger company that uses scrum as well and in my opinion, scrum delivers a lot but bad experiences. Nevertheless, I agree that it takes a while before a team that recently start scrum will gain benefit from it.
What are your experiences with scrum?
https://www.mt.nl/management/aandacht-zachte-kant-scrum/535015
https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum
