The Scrum Sucks Blog

Top Ten Ways to Survive a Scrumming Organization

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:20:18 +0000

10. Leave an unfinished task for yourself to pick up for next sprint if you don’t want to get assigned one you don’t want
9. Cause meeting conflicts to happen with Scrum meetings so that you can miss the Scrum ones with a good reason
8. Always, always over estimate for anything you are asked which helps your velocity look great at the end
7. Don’t volunteer too much information, it just causes more work for you and everyone else
6. Work on Open Source, it will make you feel better
5. Pickup every Training opportunity or Conference trip to get away from the Daily Scrum Meetings
4. Find a way to add tasks to the PBL to justify adding team members
3. Write a Perl script on a Cron job to update your Sprint task hours daily
2. Have a backup plan for when your Organization collapses from Scrum
1. Start a blog

Top Ten Words of Advice to a Manager, Director, or Vice President Deploying Scrum

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:18:49 +0000

10. Your team will not care if Scrum fails for you
9. Your team will hate you but never tell you that
8. Scrum may appear to succeed but your team will leave before they tell you how bad it is
7. You will have difficulty retaining talented team members
6. Your team will become demoralized
5. You will have difficulty attracting talented team members
4. Your team will become demotivated
3. Your team will loose all imagination
2. Your team will feel like they are in Communist Russia
1. You will not understand why your team is no more productive

Top 10 ways to survive a Scrum that Sucks

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:49:56 +0000

10. pick the easiest task you can on the list
9. find something to do with all your free time
8. stretch out all estimates to take longer than they should
7. take off hours each day so it looks like you are working
6. going to your daily standup is more important than anything any work
5. write off days with Sprint review or planning as wasted
4. don’t work on anything unless it is on your list
3. spending time with your Scrum team is more important than any work
2. there are no consequences for not finishing on time
1. don’t ever miss meetings doing actual work

Top Ten things I Hate About Scrum

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:02:32 +0000

I’ll go into these later, but here are the Top 10 things I just really hate about Scrum:

10. Burn down charts
9. Having to estimate everything
8. Roles people play
7. Sprint review
6. Sprint planning
5. Daily meetings
4. Tracking hours
3. Tracking tasks with a PBL (Product Backlog List)
2. Only working on one thing at a time
1. Not a good use of time

My First Post: So why does Scrum Suck so much?

admin — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:46:13 +0000

I am so tired of all those that just love this new thing called Scrum. For those that don’t know what Scrum is, you are not missing anything, except maybe a headache or two. Scrum is this crappy way of doing things in your project. From those that profess its love, it can be used on any kind of project so context here is not really important.

Scrum came out of this crap called Agile. I don’t know why this is so popular. Where the execs just looking for a cool new buzword and stopped at “A” in the dictionary? I guess Agile is so popular because it allows everyone who participates the ability to deflect responsibility and point fingers at others to blame when time comes in a much easier way than before. In theory the entire team should fail when things go wrong, but in reality that doesn’t happen.

What are the basics? Well, for starters there are these God Damm daily status meetings. Then there are these horrible day long meeting for planning and to recap the previous Sprint, or development milestone. After all that, the manager gets to make pretty graphs of their teams progress to show the higher ups because during the daily meetings, hourly progress is captured. Pretty soon, everyone just works to make the graphs look good instead of what really needs to be done but that’s okay, because the team never really fails.

Oh, is this still the first post? Geez, this will be a long blog…