If you told me you were an expert on Scrum or Agile, I’d give you the same look I’d give someone who’d just told me they were an expert on Astrology, or that they’d just become an Operating Thetan at the Church of Scientology. Scrum and Agile are cargo cults masquerading as methodology.
Despite this, I’ve been keeping track of how many story points I’ve cumulatively achieved over my lifetime, and I’d like the total etched into my tombstone. It will be a monument to wasted time, a testament to the hours spent in sprint planning, retrospectives, and daily standups that could have been spent building software instead, or doing literally anything else.
I don’t differentiate between Scrum and Agile. I don’t pretend to care anymore. Would you like to be kicked in the groin with my left foot or my right foot? Neither, thanks very much. I’ve heard that Agile was a good idea that was hijacked by the big consulting firms and isn’t actually practiced as intended. That might be true. If you read the Agile Manifesto, it sounds reasonable if you ignore the context of the crimes that have been committed in its name. At every place I’ve encountered it, it’s had a different flavour. It’s almost as if everyone has intuitively grasped that it isn’t any good, so they’ve changed it.
I had a conversation recently with someone from the business side about Scrum or Agile. I don’t remember which word they used because I zoned out as soon as I heard it. But I came to in time to hear this: they were working on a version of it that would give business people visibility into projections of when things would be done. This blew my mind.
They thought that the Agile/Scrum process (peace be upon it) with all its inscrutable artifacts and ceremonies — the story points, the velocity tracking, the burndown charts, the solemn vows to live up to the Sprint’s committed tasks — are in the service of some opaque purpose related to software development. They believed all this ritual was meant to help developers build better software.
Meanwhile, developers believe that this insane process is imposed on them for no other reason than to provide some kind of visibility for the business side. They think it’s all process theater to make management feel like they understand what’s happening. No developer has ever expressed to me that they thought any of it was useful to them.
It is crazy. Both sides think the process exists to serve the other side, and both sides hate it. Everyone loses, except the consultants selling Scrum certifications. (My personal theory is that Atlassian is operating some kind of kickback scheme that’s keeping this corpse afloat.)
But we need to follow some kind of process, right?
The answer isn’t a better version of Scrum or a return to “true Agile.” I won’t go into detail here, but there is a methodology that serves simultaneously as:
- a communication tool that brings together business domain experts and engineering
- a software design methodology that results in a complete specification
- living documentation of the software system that’s understandable by business and developers
- a project management “board” so you can get rid of Jira
It involves breaking the use cases down into slices so small that they should be estimate-able. I’ve come to believe this is the way the job should be done. Making the overhead of “Agile” process unnecessary is only one beautiful aspect of it.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Sprint. Amen.