What Scrum stopped us from doing

What happened to Scrum? Why are so many people claiming its dead? Did Agile fail us? Well I don't think so... This seems to be a popular trend lately, people say Agile is dead, you shouldn't do Scrum, or Kanban and so on, you've probably seen this a lot already. If you think about it... Can you blame a fork because you can't eat a soup with it? I hope not, what I mean by this is simple, the tools are there for us to use them, but we can only blame ourselves if we use the wrong tool for the job!

Scrum started according to a quick google search in 1993, around 31 years ago and it wasn't until 2001 that the Agile manifesto was signed, its been a while and I can only admire that some of this principles are still alive and used today. But a lot of it became a business, and we've got Professional Scrum Masters, Delivery Leads and Managers, Product Owners and Managers, Agile Coaches and so many more, so many people made a career and business out of this principles and frameworks.

Agile and Scrum gave us Jira! Who doesn't use Jira this days? Well if it isn't Jira it has to be Trello, long gone are the days of the whiteboards with sticky notes! No! Those are still here as well! So much came out of it, but in the process we lost something very important... The ability to have meaningful conversations about work.

What happened to our conversations about the work?

With Scrum came something I hate with passion, estimating Software Engineering Tasks with so many different ridiculous methods... T-Shirt Sizing, Fibonacci, Planning Poker and so much more... The consequences of this was that all the Engineers and Developers will sit around a table to throw numbers at very complex issues. The idea was to start a conversation! But 30 years into this it has done the complete opposite and it has killed the conversation about how we are going to solve this problems as a team.

Have you ever been in one of this estimation session and your Delivery Manager/Product Owner have said something like: Sorry [Insert your favourite Engineer here] I think we are solutionising here... But that's exactly the point! This sessions were created for Engineers to be able to talk in detail about how the work that is going to be done, but this days is just about ticking a checkbox and moving on...

Sometimes is to do with the process, when teams are new they tend to discuss the wrong things for a bit longer... What does a 10 mean to you? Is L 3 days for you or 10? Please don't think about time! Think about effort (The Scrum Master would say)... But at least there is a conversation going on, what tends to happen overtime is that the team silently agrees on a pattern (surely the 3 is half a day) and this is when this Agile frameworks kill all our conversations about how we are going to do the work, once this hidden pattern is set, no one else talks about what we are doing we just want to be done with the session as soon and efficiently as possible.

What can we do then?

Well my solution and what I've been practicing for about 3 years now is very simple, go back to basics...

Are estimations important? No... If you know your team you surely know roughly how long things take, if you don't then you probably need to be closer to your team to understand what this looks like, and this should be the Lead, Product Owner or Delivery Manager's job. And their job is also to make sure the team has a space to have the right conversations about the work...

What are we doing and WHY! (Please always ask why) How are we going to test this piece of software? Are we delivering value with this? How are we going to monitor this feature? Do we need to add tracking? What does that look like? What do we not know? Can we investigate that first?

I would take the above set of questions over whatever estimation methodology you have any time and I can assure you will get better results. And if you are a Software Engineer or developer in a team where you don't have the above, then please be the change... How? By asking questions and not falling into the default!

But people above need to know how long it will take! Well they won't, and if you are doing this estimations, they surely won't either, but if you are having the right conversations about the work, you are likely to have a better idea overall!

Conclusion

Has agile failed? Probably not, does Scrum work? Depends on how you use it, and Kanban? Its the same! But don't let any framework take away the most important part of our jobs: Communicating and working together to understand what needs to be done, how you are going to do it, and why.