Why Scrum Should Basically Die in a Fire

September 18, 2014 📬 Get My Weekly Newsletter

Giles Bowkett posted a great piece on the deep flaws of Agile processes like Scrum. It’s spot-on with my experience. There’s so many choice quotes, it’s hard to pull just one, but I’ll try. Toward the end of the article:

I’ve never seen Scrum-like frameworks for transmuting the work of designers, marketers, or accountants into cartoonish oversimplifications like story points. People are happy to treat these workers as adults and trust them to do their jobs.

I don’t know why this same trust does not prevail in the culture of managing programmers.

After a job converting JIRA Tickets into Story Points into diffs, I eventually realized that good developers deliver results, not promises, points, or even features. I even wrote an entire book about it.

Thankfully, the team at Stitch Fix has no sprints, story points, velocity, or planning poker. We just solve the most important problem at hand, and move onto the next most important one.