We hate Scrum and Agile…when it’s done wrong (Ep. 489)
Well, we don’t hate it per se. It’s more of a love/hate relationship, if we’re honest with ourselves. You can do it wrong: excessive top-down structure is the kryptonite of developer brilliance. Or you can do it right: setting up the team so everyone feels empowered and blameless accountability lets you evolve from mistakes and improve over time.
For today’s podcast episode, we sat down with two of our public platform teammates: Jon Chan, Director of Engineering, and Shanda Woods, Certified Scrum Professional extraordinaire, who also happens to be a yoga instructor and cycling coach. We discuss how to embrace Agile and Scrum as a creativity-driving mindset rather than a system of micromanagement.
Episode notes
About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum.
Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of introspection and accountability rather than the rigidness of enforcement.
Agile and Scrum get a lot of hate. But is that their fault or are you doing it wrong?
We talked about this on the podcast a few years ago, when Ben, Paul, and Sara wondered, “Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?”
It’s about providing support—not punishing people. Done right, Agile and Scrum can be a force of freedom and autonomy when they start with trust.
Connect with Shanda and Jon on LinkedIn.
We conclude with a big high five to Lifeboat badge winner jminkler for their answer to how to create an Instagram share link in PHP (thank you).
‘Til next time.
Tags: agile, scrum, the stack overflow podcast
5 Comments
I hate horses when they’re not unicorns
I hate vim when I can’t exit out of it
so you never hate Vim? otherwise user err
in nearly 15 years of doing agile as a developer on many teams, I can confirm 100% that agile is simply a way for non-technical managers to have developers do all the tasks for project management without having to become at all technical themselves. Its an utter waste of development time (after all, only developers can develop, but anyone can manage and do other non-technical tasks). I have never actually done waterfall, but would love to do it one day to get away from the nonsense of meetings with 20 minutes in between for development.
Can you please post a transcript, so we don’t have to waste time listening to the recording? People read MUCH faster than people speak.