Re:Scrum disempowers developers
by christophilus on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @09:30AM
(#17187467)
My company doesn't claim to be agile, I don't think. We just allow devs to work on whatever they find interesting. If something really urgent comes up, its urgency is made known to the dev team at large, and someone always steps up to the plate. Works fine for us! Also, we don't have deadlines. Things ship when they are "good enough".
Granted, we're very selective in our hiring process, but it means things just work without much need for fancy management practices.
If any dev managers are reading this, I can say, this approach works, and you should give it a try.
A previous company I was at worked this way and it was a dream. That said, it does require very selective screening processes and maturity from those you do hire.
However, it was the most happy / least stressed I've ever been in my life. I still get beers almost weekly with over half that team. This "strategy" really built comradery because we were always talking and discussing rather than leaving comments on some Jira ticket (which we did for async or when necessary).
Seriously.... give it a shot if you can
Agile implies getting things done and getting things to market. If scrum helps you do that great. If not, ditch it. In my experience, Kanban is a step up on the evolutionary ladder. Both have issues with not prioritizing essential activities related to research, refactoring, etc. that you need to guard against. There's a difference between agile and firefighting.
One worry with scrum is the roles of product manager and scrum master. In my experience these things end up being formal job titles in bigger organizations. This is bad because they are typically on the very low end of the scale. That means you end up with the least experienced people filling these roles and a lot of corporate politics. I've seen more than a few organizations that were hiring accordingly.