I think I found my favorite site in the world. http://www.scrumsucks.com/

Now, I don’t know if the authors are intentionally saying that scrum sucks of if they’re simply collecting a list of gripes that people have about scrum, but I’ve found it amazingly useful in exploring some of the most commonly noticed Symptoms of an impediment or a roadblock to development.

Huh?

Ok let me break it down.

Your car starts sputtering and has a lack of acceleration. That is a symptom of the problem. It’s something that you perceive… and this is good. It means you now KNOW there is a problem.

Break for a second. Scrum doesn’t resolve problems, it’s not a silver bullet, it simply tells you that there is news and it’s THE TEAM'S job to do something with that news.

Ok so now you know there is a problem, your car is sputtering and won’t accelerate. You take it to the mechanic and they start looking at things… the fuel injection, the fuel pump, the mass air flow sensor, the spark plugs, the distributer or electronic ignition system… etc. etc.

To troubleshoot the issue they may swap out a part… like replace the air filter and see if that helps.

Ok let’s get back to scrum.

You have a symptom… something isn’t working… you go into the retrospective and you know something isn’t right. Let’s say people constantly sandbagging estimates. You put that right in front of their faces and say “hey look you’re sandbagging”. We don’t mean to put you on the defensive, we’re simply wanting to know why you’re sandbagging. The sandbagger may not even know why they are sandbagging their estimates or maybe they don’t even realize that they are sandbagging their estimates.

One of the interesting things I hear from developers (very very experienced developers especially) is that well we have to estimate way larger, trust me you don’t want to estimate on the short side.

What does this mean?

Well let’s think through what “Normally” happens when you say something is going to be done in 2 weeks. The managers or people that you feel have a big affect on your career and your pay scale expect that thing to take 2 weeks so they go and tell other people that it will be done in 2 weeks, they go and scream to the world that hey it’s going to be done in 2 weeks because I trust my developer!

2 weeks come and go and it’s not finished… guess what happens?

We’ve all been here… people are disappointed.

So we don’t like to disappoint people who affect our pay scale! So we make our estimates bigger and bigger so there’s no way we could possibly fail at delivering in the timeframe that we suggest!

How are people in your work experiencing symptoms of a bad scrum like you see on http://www.scrumsucks.com/ ?

What are some examples of the real root cause of these symptoms?

I’d love to see some comments.