Is Scrum Really Awful? Breaking Down
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Ben reacts to Pirate Software’s take on Scrum, stand-up meetings, and productivity in game development. Whether you're a fan of Pirate Software or interested in improving team workflows, this video is packed with insights and practical advice.
Pirate Software Original Video: • Scrum
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At my old job, we had daily 'scrums'. They were awful and a waste of time. Then I read about scrums and they didn't resemble what we were doing in any meaningful way. It was just progress meetings, lead by the manager, by another name. If there's anything worse than a bad idea, it's a good idea done badly.
i think a very common problem in scrum standups specifically is that it is more likely that standup becomes a status meeting for managers and leadership than an opportunity for team alignment and collaboration. that's the kind of scrum that Thor is talking about, and while that's not scrum applied properly, it is far more common to see in the industry than scrum done in a way that encourages self organizing teams and collaboration.
Absolutely agree. Hence why I find Thor's perspective completely understandable. If your only options are a terrible-waste-of-time-standup and NO standup, take no standup. But recognize that while it may be less common, actually valuable standups are possible and can be incredibly helpful.
I am also in the same boat, it's more of a status meeting for project manager, even more so now as quite a lot of us are remote. The team also grew so there are too many people, way past 10 (vaguely remember that's recommended max). The upside it kind is the start of the day for most people.
Funny enough, my best scrum experience was the first project I worked more than than years back, thinking back, the manager understood scrum deeper and acted more consciously. Also whole team was on premise.
For collaboration even coffee breaks seem more fruitful as you tend to start talking about work stuff pretty fast. Remote does not have that either. There are some people in our team that have Fika breaks, personally I don't like them.
I'll say I've heard great things about SCRUM when done correctly, but I've never actually seen a studio do it well. One out of the ten places I've worked did a decent job because the producer in charge was very strict in using the meeting to push forward collaboration and issue solving. That producer would receive update emails from all the team leaders and would do a quick summary in five minutes or less covering all departments. It was decent. In all the other studios the standup turned into full project updates that would sometimes take an hour.
Though in defense of SCRUM, 8 of the other studios were JIRA studios. The system designed to everyone's time.
my scrum meetings are just a dozen people saying "yesterday i did the thing that i told you all i was going to do and today i'm going to do the same thing"
This is a great example of an anti-pattern. I actually don't use the "3 questions" when I do a daily team sync, whatever else you want to call it. I've found it might help a brand new team get used to talking to each other, but as training wheels it also encourages some bad patterns, and this one you've called out is not a good use of time in my experience. Right there with you!
The amount of productive comms that can happen in a Slack channel dedicated to a pod or feature shouldn’t be underestimated (not saying that you are, just making the point). Meetings should really be a last resort after other, less disruptive, channels of comms have been considered. Face time is important for a team, but it must be leveraged judiciously.
In my experience most people who say they hate SCRUM dont actually hate SCRUM, they hate the corporate culture of their workplace and bad implementations of SCRUM principles is just the most visible symptom of those culture problems.
So often people will say "I hate SCRUM" and then go on to describe how they have 3 different PO's who cant agree on anything and their dailies are hour long meetings with dozens of participants". Yea, i would hate that too, but its nothing to do with SCRUM.
Spot on. My issue with agile in general is that it's been co-opted towards an old status quo that promises empowerment and gives only burnout and confusion.
But that's not the only possible outcome.
So let's see, we set up a system where if you don't finish all your story points you get crucified (maybe not on week one, but definitely soon if you miss more than a couple). What do you think the reaction of devs is to this situation. They start padding the tasks to make them appear longer, so they can be very sure they don't get crucified. Then there's the issue of constant meetings, a stand-up every day is INSANE. I don't care if it lasts 15 minutes or 2 minutes, it's just stupid. If you can't get by with 2 or 3 meetings a week, your team is full of idiots. If you need to communicate with a team member, just do it, you don't need a meeting for it. Then there's scrum of scrums, backlog grooming, retrospectives, the meetings never end, and most of the time the same things get repeated in meeting after meeting. Then there's the fact that managers aren't supposed to be in the stand-up meetings, but they are MANAGERS, so they go, and nobody will ever call them on it. Story points aren't supposed to be used for performance reviews, but they are (either explicitly or implicitly). My favorite is the terminology. "Sprint", by it's very name it implies an unsustainable effort, but we are expected to be sprinting at every instance. I know of many hugely successful software projects, Doom, Quake, Excel, Unix, Photoshop and many more, what I don't know of is any great software that was written under the yoke of Scrum. Don't even get me started with the piece of crap that is Jira, I might actually vomit. Scrum has taken one of the most exciting and amazing careers possible and turned it into something that people hate to engage in.
"So let's see, we set up a system where if you don't finish all your story points you get crucified"
Not Scrum. If you are being crucified for missing commitments you are going to be crucified no matter what framework you use. That is company culture, nothing to do with scrum and that won't magically go away because you stopped using Scrum.
"Then there's the issue of constant meetings, a stand-up every day is INSANE"
There is one mandatory meeting during the sprint, that is the Daily Scrum. If you think that talking to your team for 5 minutes at the start of the day is unnecessary you are either in the wrong team or don't need to be using Scrum
"If you can't get by with 2 or 3 meetings a week, your team is full of idiots"
If you only need to talk to your team mates 2 times a week I don't understand the point of your "team" and you 100% do not need to be using Scrum
"If you need to communicate with a team member, just do it, you don't need a meeting for it"
That is the point of the daily scrum. Instead of the possibility of being interrupted at any point throughout your day and being unable to block out deep work time you have a Daily Scrum, you quickly align, you quickly check if anyone is blocked, needs helps, and then you go away assured that you aren't going to be just randomly interrupted throughout the day.
" and nobody will ever call them on it"
So call them out on it. Again if your culture has micro-managing managers who don't trust that team that has nothing to do with Scrum, and it doesn't go away because you stopped using Scrum
" Story points aren't supposed to be used for performance reviews, but they are"
Story points aren't even Scrum, and again if your manager is trying to micro-manage performance they are doing to do this with or without Scrum
"Sprint", by it's very name it implies an unsustainable effort, but we are expected to be sprinting at every instance.
That is just silly. Have you even read the Scrum guide? It clearly calls out the need for sustained pace.
All scrum does is surface dysfunctional culture. If you have a hidden dysfunctional culture before Scrum you will have a visibly dysfunctional culture after Scrum. That is a gift, why you think dropping Scrum would change any of this I've no idea
Also not a fan of JIRA. I do believe everyone on the team should be in standups, to include "managers" if they are a part of the team. But that will depend on the org structure. Sometimes they are pure stakeholders and don't need to be there.
Agree also that bad patterns can cause more bad patterns. This is true of all frameworks or processes you apply. Unfortunately, the complete lack of process also has low odds of success once you get past maybe 2 or 3 people.
Whether a daily sync is important or not is dependent on the environment. I have a military background. There are chaotic situations that require far more frequent than daily syncs. There are other environments where nothing meaningful might change for long periods of time. The question is, where is your team, especially within the context of game dev.
I know many teams that could get by with 2 or 3 meetings a week, but could get by better with more. And this is the fundamental question: is the opportunity cost of a meeting worth what you get from it? If the answer is no, you should remove or improve the meeting. If the answer is yes, you might still look to improve the meeting, but removing it no longer makes sense.
Some of the best teams I know met insanely frequently, because that was there path to high effectiveness, productivity, and focus. Some of those meetings were formal, some were informal, but they knew they had to be proactive about staying on the same page.
Alignment is in a constant state of entropy. If you don't counter that you will be going in different directions way faster than you'd think.
@@buildingbettergames Thanks for your intelligent and well thought out reply. You seem like someone who would be good to be on a team with. I wish for us all to have great teams to work with, and then the organizing principles don't really matter, great teams make things work. Best Regards.
Scrum is awful because it's very anti-agile. It's so focused on processes and ceremonies instead of getting feedback from users and adjusting. The agile manifesto literally says focus on people over process. Still better than safe though.
That's why it's supposed to be lead by one of the peer employees and not a manager and it's not supposed to be a round-robin of people regurgitating their Gant charts but only saying what's needed.
5:07 what you need to address is the devs inability to do collaborative work if they’re not physically next to each other.
Collaboration can happen asynchronously, and that’s frequently the way it should happen when building software. You just shouldn’t need anyone else’s input to your work on a daily basis, if you do then your tasks are scoped way too narrowly and have too many external dependencies.
Even if it does need to be a synchronous collaboration slack and zoom exist.
in-person meetings are only useful for decision-making with a large number of people who need to agree, which should be extremely rare.
We have different philosophies here. Yes, collaboration can be done asynch. It can also be done synchronously, and that has definite advantages. Asynch comms are less rich and have a much longer question and answer loop. Whether one or the other "should" happen when building software probably depends on a lot of local context.
The frame you put around "your work" and "shouldn't need input" is where I find the axioms to be different from mine. It's our work, and you don't necessarily NEED input, but you want it, because you recognize that extra eyeballs are helpful, not harmful, when done well. Acknowledging that it can also be done poorly and be a drain, things like paired programming and other technical practices aren't because anyone "needs" that, it's because it leads to everyone having a better outcome.
I disagree with your narrow view of meetings. I've had many valuable meetings that had only two people in the room, and sometimes no decision was made, context was shared. But the advantage of being in-person made the time spent together (physically or virtually) much more effective than if we'd gone back and forth in slack trying to hash out the same thing.
@ I disagree about async comms being less rich when done correctly. By their nature they can include much more context than a simple conversation, and the longer question and answer loop is part of the point, it gives both sides time to properly understand that context and provide a valuable response.
We definitely do have different axioms around “your” work vs. “our” work - more eyeballs and opinions certainly can lead to a better outcome, but that’s far from the default, and the more likely outcome is just bike shedding and meaningless changes. I’ve seen much better outcomes letting engineers take ownership of the biggest possible chunk of a project and letting them figure it out from there. I also think pair programming is massively over-used and only really helpful when either onboarding a new dev or the rare case where a single piece of code actually needs two skill sets that don’t exist in one persons brain.
On your last point, I think we have different definitions of the word “meeting”. I would call collaborating with one person to share context more of a collaboration session than a meeting. With the fundamental difference being that the reason it happened is because 2 engineers decided for themselves that the interaction is valuable, rather than it being mandated by their management.
Which is really the core of my feelings around this entire topic. My job as a manager isn’t, and never should be, to tell my people how to do their jobs, it’s to set goals and then support them however they need to hit those goals, and part of that is trusting that they know what they need better than I do.
@@MikeGaruccio
As differently as some of our previous definitions are, you and I pretty aligned on your last paragraph. Leadership is there to set up the environment and people to succeed. It's not to direct everything. It's not the right environment for that, at all, and the environment where you need to tell everyone what to do all the time is actually pretty rare. So I'll take the agreement on the role of leadership as a win! :D
This seems like the kind of thing that would vary tremendously depending on the team/environment. I don't like the prevalence of one size fits all 'management systems' that kind of get shoehorned into offices/production environments without an understanding of the current culture. Pirate seems to have spent a lot of dev time on smaller focused indie teams doing passion projects (I think he was mostly QA at blizzard), maybe in that kind of environment he did find formal scrums unnecessary.
It does vary heavily depending on environment. That's why the underlying question is, is it worthwhile for us to chat briefly as a team daily or at some other cadence? In my experience, the answer is often yes even when teams aren't doing that and don't want to, and the consequences of not doing it are being felt through failures to collaborate effectively, failure to stay focused on what's most important, and failure to help each other out.
One might argue that you could do all those things WITHOUT a 15 minute meeting, and I agree with that as well. But for many teams, a short daily conversation about what's most important and how we can support each other IS the mechanism to achieve those ends.
Now, if you don't share goals, don't collaborate, and therefore don't really support each other much, I would argue you aren't really a "team" in the sense that a standup expects, and then I'd recommend NOT having them, certainly not daily, unless some other driver required it.
@@buildingbettergames I think in a lot of teams the crosstalk happens naturally as necessary during the process so 15 minutes disconnected from context to have a chat seems unnecessary. Lots of people are constantly in contact through slack/emails/discord.
@@WhatAMagician
Hey, if the challenges of staying aligned, collaborating well, and keeping people informed in ways that help the team deliver value happen outside of a formal "standup," then the team has solved the problem in a different way. Nothing wrong with that!
I have found in my experience leading, coaching, and observing dev teams in games that teams will frequently claim that is happening when it is not. I don't think that's because they are lying. I think it's because they don't really know what that type of high functioning environment looks like and they don't think standups help. To their credit, in many of those instances the standups DON'T help, because they have become simple status meetings more about informing external parties than a recurring opportunity for us to make sure we're focused together on what matters most.
@@WhatAMagician if a 15 minute meeting at the start of the day is so disruptive that you can't get into a flow before lunch, but constant contact on Slack that can happen at any point is fine, there is something else going on for why people don't like standup
Scrum is awful. I hate stand ups. The end.
Okay?
So standup is *supposed* to be 2 people deep diving into a topic that only applies to them and could happen offline instead of wasting the entire team's time? Or are you saying it's a meeting to schedule that meeting? Or are you saying it's literally only for conversations that require the *entire team* ? In which case, why the *hell* wouldn't the person who needs that large cross-team topic reviewed just schedule a dedicated meeting for it? None of these options make any sense. Your response is highly ambiguous and only points to how poorly defined "scrum" is in most people's minds
Does enough change every day on your team to warrant talking to each other about it? If so, a daily sync/standup/meeting where we talk about the most important stuff our team needs to know and stay up to date on might have value.
I have preferences about what should be discussed, but it really depends on the context.
I know that multiple times when teams have claimed they don't need that, and they can collaborate just fine without a meeting, I've let them test that theory. It doesn't usually work out. It's just really easy to get distracted and forget to stay on target as a group.
But again, the fundamental question for ANY process: is the time/energy cost worth more than whatever else we could be doing? We all have our biases around that answer, but it remains the question requiring answering. Don't do standups just because you "should" according to some guide. But also don't skip them because they always suck. Neither is a good place to be.
I think you're ironically making the same argument that I am. Everything has its context. That's the point. That's why teams & individuals should be scheduling meetings when they are *actually needed and contextually appropriate* , not having mandatory meetings regardless of contextual necessity. The whole problem is when someone comes in and says "we're having this meeting because 'scrum', because 'process'". The dogma is completely unhelpful and unnecessary. The whole issue that engineers & people like Thor are complaining about *is* that there are so many people out there scheduling required meetings without a good contextual justification for doing so. It's just entirely unclear to me what you're counterargument is other than "yeah but sometimes you do need a meeting". That's obvious.
It only works when done right. I've never had a stand up longer than 15 minutes. Also doesn't take me 40 minutes to get back into a workflow either. There's definitely annoying aspects of scrum but it still works when done correctly. Seems the dev in the video is being extra dramatic about his peeves regarding his workplace's version of scrum.
Thor is one hundred percent correct, scrum destroys morale and productivity. Stand-ups are a part of the problem.
A method must be adapted to the real situation. “Scrum” is designed so that in “big teams” there are no major miscommunication problems. If you have to have someone who "must have everything in mind" and who has to go everywhere to check that there is no miscommunication.. It's even more complicated.
Especially since during a meeting everyone can explain why a particular feature is important and on the other side what is the problems encountered in implementing this feature. This allows ppl to understand each other and find solutions.
Pirate has no idea about office culture, because he was a son of a "big guy" in blizzard for many years so the rules and customs must have not applied to him. When he went to work at amazon he got promptly fired, which would explain his distain to management in general. I also dont think he understands how humans work. His suggestion is to basically become an in-house contractor dev - just lets PM and Prod duke it out, while giving us emails on what to do next. He completely ignores that DEVS might need to articulate things to management and their management or just between themselves. He seems to be saying whatever people want to hear: scrum bad, meetings useless hurr durrr...
I wouldnt want this guy to be nowhere near my team, let alone inside it.
Scrum the anti-agile methodology, a wet dream for non-technical people, I agree 100% with Thor, if I was a CEO I would penalize managers for every minute of the day they take away from developers.
Understandable. The vast majority of daily standups I've seen in the wild in game dev have not provided value worth the cost.
But I have also seen them return that value in spades. It's not easy though, so if you want easy I wouldn't recommend anything that requires thinking abstractly, and agile done well expects that of everyone.
Are you really actively defending scrum out of sheer desperation? Nobody is criticizing how you are using scrum, what is being criticized is the approach itself.
Have you ever been on the other side of it? Scrum is literally a waste of time. Most of the time, wherever I worked, scrum takes off an hour of work out of the 8 working hours.
I’m not advocating for waterfall, but if you need news just schedule a meeting with the part of the team interested by the news you need to hear.
I don’t need to know what the front end is working on, and neither does the front end needs to know what I’m working on. Scrum master should just study the actual development then magically they could rely the information to the upper management. That’s really all there is to it. And by the way, most of the times you guys give out wrong information. Scrum is really the middle man nobody needed.
You didn’t listen to him at all did you
Oh, yeah? And what is it you think I didn’t listen to? “If there’s no need for the standup don’t do it?” I’m sorry that’s not how it works. If I or anybody else skips, or remains silent out of sheer spite, you will eventually get reprimanded. Again, personal approach is not the issue, it’s the damn context. Scrum does not work. What is your job, on which of the side do you stand? Scrum or devs? I’ve worked on so many different project and no matter the damn scale, scrum is just not efficient/good enough.
Scrum takes more like half of the day.
@my bad, youre comment gives insight. I glearmed this from your message and reflection that its not scrum that works, but the people participating that make it so. And everything completely depends on context and the people there.
"I don’t need to know what the front end is working on, and neither does the front end needs to know what I’m working on"
Ok ... sounds like you aren't on the same team with them, so why are you having daily scrum with them?
If your manager is forcing you to have meetings with the front end for no reason what would dropping Scrum do there?
" scrum takes off an hour of work out of the 8 working hours."
Lol, what?
You are definitely doing Scrum wrong
Scrum is an agile framework and one of the key components of agile is transparency. If you work in a dysfunctional company Scrum will surface that dysfunction.
I get that this is painful, but if a team's response to this is to say "Quick, get rid of Scrum so we can go back not knowing all this dysfunction exists" then you are taking the wrong message from Scrum.
For example I once knew a dev who hated Scrum because in the last company he worked for they introduced Scrum. He described having stand-ups that lasted over an hour and when we met he was super negative on Scrum and said he was never doing it again.
I asked him why did the stand-ups take an hour, a question that he seemed to have not examined much beyond "well Scrum says do stand-ups and ours took an hour"
As I probed he explained that when they introduced the stand-ups it was the first time the team had ever properly discussed what anyone else on the team was doing, what coding decisions they were making, what system design they were using, what they were working on. And once they started discussing that everyone just spend the whole time arguing with each other about what everyone else was doing.
And all I said to him was "Right ... and you think that is the fault of Scrum.?" At which point he kinda got my point.
Scrum will surface dysfunction. You might fix it, you might not. You might have the power to fix it, you might not. But it won't be anything to do with Scrum. It was already there, you just are now aware of it. But like Cypher in the Matrix so many people just want to go back to the time they either didn't know about this dysfunction or didn't think it was their job to do anything about the dysfunction.
This. Right here. Well said sir!
the only dysfunction that has surfaced is that the agile framework is snake oil
@ But that is a nonsense analysis. Thousands of companies use Scrum successfully every day. I've worked in a few. If a team struggles to implement Scrum it is almost never because of the framework itself.
Its like someone proclaiming that C is a terrible programming language, but when you look at the code its a single 30k line function made up mostly of "if" statements.
And then when you say "well you are writing terrible C code" they say "if I can't write good C its because the language sucks"
CTO here. Been in the industry for 30+ years. This is a privilage and attitude problem. I have no time for this BS anymore as it's been getting worse and worse each year (See Tim Cain's infamous "caution" video).
Some people have to check in and out of work everyday for gods sake and people are moaning about a small meeting to make sure we were good yesterday and we have a plan for today!
All we're asking for (seeing as the business you work for has to make money to pay your wages) is a cohesive team, working well with each other and being as productive as is reasonable. This is no different to the old days of my manager asking me directly each day "how I'm doing?" or "What are you working on at the moment?"
And with the sort of rounding he did in this video to go from 15 minutes to "No work before lunch", I'm surprised he's even a coder. Embarrasing.
A large swathe of the software industry should be ashamed of itself quite frankly. I appreciate that estimates aren't a promise and that some people in higher management lack that understanding, but if you can't see ANY value in PMs, Product Owners, CEOs, Customers, ESTIMATES or 15 MINUTE WORK CHECK-INS, go work for a charity or set your own business up!
PirateSoftware has some good points... Sometimes. But I think most often he sounds like a guy that worked in single workplace that according to him is be all end all, golden standard for how the world works and his opinions and knowledge based on that are absolute
Every developer I know that was vehemently against scrum was unorganized and inefficient, or some other flaw.
Every team I have installed it on gets mad when I get overwhelmed and stop doing it; they demand it back.
The problem isn't the process, it's the people. That being said, adjust your process to fit the team dynamic and need. It's not useless if done correctly.
No wonder Pirate has no idea what scrum is truly about since he never was a real programmer. You know what kind of people hate daily stand ups ? The ones that aren't doing anything so they dont want anyone to find out that they are lazy. Its also very clear, that he is not a team player.. you can't work in a team if you are not communicating with each other and talking about your issues or progress and thats what daily meetings are about.
I wonder what part of Thors past work lead you to the conclusion that he is "not a real programmer"? His work as Red Team Specialist by blizzard? His accomplishments at defcon? his work for the goverment? Or is it his succesfull dev-company he currently have? Most, if not in all of them, he was part for even led a team. So your comment really makes no sense
@@Kraark1992 He worked at QA not red team, His general knowledge of programming and security is basic at best, pentesting is not sofisticated hacking magic its basic stuff in security/IT work. And dont even start about his 'game'. Just look the steam review its basically abandoned unfinished project probably written by someone else than him. He just edit config files and yamls at stream and ppl think he is a programmer. I work 10 years as devops engineer, all the things he claims to be is bullshit
Get a life dude. Stop wasting time on internet drama and white knighting for twitch streamers. You're better than that.
@ he did both, actually, QA AND red team, pretty simple to google that fact. All you do is gatekeeping for some bullshit reasons, I just dont understand why. Are you so unsatisfied with your own life that you have to shit on others?
@ I like my life, but thanks for your concerns, but to waht I waaste time on is not your problem ;) . Its not about "white knighting", thats a bullshit reason you pull up if you dont have anything more relevant to say. I dont have to "fight" for Thor, he can do it for himself, i barely watch his content anyway. But it took me 3 minutes google search to find out that you just hate him for the hate :)