Thread by @christianhujer

Today is rant day. Let me see what I've got.

Scrum is bullshit. Skip it. Directly move to XP.

Warning: occasional strong language ahead.

Scrum is all about empiricism. Empiricism is good. Empiricism is usually not the problem. In fact, Scrum can even increase the problem.

So you know you have a problem. You can't react to change fast enough. Empiricism isn't helpful: it will only tell you what you already know: that you can't react to change fast enough.

Scrum doesn't deliver answers. And that may still be okay if we consider that questions are more important than answers. But it doesn't even ask the right questions.

And when there are a relevant number of teams out there that are successfully doing the right things, wouldn't you want to take a peek look at them to find out what they're doing? Wouldn't you want to learn from others and see if it works for you as well?

But you went for Scrum. You invested a lot of energy in it. You sent people to certification classes. You nominated people for roles. Now all is going to get better. Yes? No. Bullshit. You've wasted your energy in something that doesn't deliver a single tangible thing.

Your development team is still making a mess. Now it's just making even more mess even faster. #FlaccidScrum and #TractorPull. And your Scrum Master? They ain't gonna fix it, for they don't know shit. "But they know Scrum!" Problem is, Scrum doesn't know shit.

Scrum does not address the mess engineers make. It only makes it worse. It diverts organizational transformational energy in the wrong things. It creates expectations. It increases the pressure. And what happens? The mess is only getting worse!

Back to empiricism. At least that's good about Scrum. Yes? No, it isn't.

Scrum provides empiricism daily (DSM), every iteration (review, retro, planning), and every release. That's good, isn't it? No, it isn't. It doesn't stand a chance in comparison to XP.

XP provides empiricism on the levels of seconds (pairing/mobbing), minutes (unit tests), hours (pair negotiation), daily (DSM), days (new acceptance tests), every iteration (review, retro, planning).

Plus, XP empiricism is very explicitly inclusive of the engineering practices.

And if you believe that empiricism about engineering practices is a different topic, you haven't understood a single thing about agile software development, sorry: the engineering practices are at the heart! Which makes Scrum, well, pretty heartless.

Your team can't react to change because its code is a mess. Its a tightly coupled entangled ball of goo. It smells of rigidity, making change is hard. It smells of fragility, making change is risky. It smells of inseparability and immobility, scaling and reuse seem impossible.

It smells of opacity, the team can't even understand what's going on in the code. And the process is viscous, building, testing, releasing take such a long time that it drags the business down.

Scrum doesn't address any of this. Not. A. Single. Bit.

Scrum is slow. A potentially shippable product increment every iteration? In software? In 2020? You're gonna make a poor snail yawn.

Some of the vocabulary of Scrum is abusive. Sprint? Are they crazy? A series of sprints isn't sustainable place! Hiking is. I've heard somebody say "I want my team to give 120% every sprint. It's called sprint after all."

I'm not saying XP is best. Evolution goes on, knowledge increases. And most XP teams have moved beyond XP. But even in 2020, the original XP from ~2000 beats the shit out of Scrum.

But yeah, get certified for it, if that makes you happy.

But doesn't it's success means it works?

No.

All it means is that it is possible to build up a certification pyramid scheme industry to pull money out of the pockets of ignorant organizations that are screaming for help when they have a dissonance-avoiding procurement behavior.

But isn't Scrum vs XP a false dichotomy? After all, XP "includes" Scrum, isn't it?

Technically, that's true.
But practically, it usually isn't - except for those orgs that see Scrum as the start of a solid plan to go for other things like XP as well.