🍵 👁‍🗨 👨‍🚀 Disciplined Agile. What's the point? ✡️ 📹 🕷️

But is there Scrum ?!

Do not misunderstand me. I love Scrum. I've been using Scrum for years wherever it really works. But let's face it - the phrase from the Scrum Guide “Scrum is easy to understand, hard to master” [1] - very accurately captures the essence [Note: in Russian “easy to understand, difficult to master”. For some reason, in the official Russian translation, they cynically limited it to the maxim “Scrum is simple”]. And that explains why so many teams easily fall for the Zombie Scrum heresy.

Because of this complexity to understand, teams definitely need a good coach who has a healthy empirical approach and can help start a process that is truly hands-on. The mechanical execution of the prescribed rituals fails to provide a viable process. But are there many such coaches? It is easy to find out by simply taking numbers from the scrum.org site [2]. More than 300,000 are certified as PSM I. If the Russian-language series of articles hits the Habr audience, I will definitely tell you about what all these certifications really mean, but let's just assume for now that anyone who can read and understand the words in the Scrum Guide is easy will pass PSM I. Now let's look at certifications that require understanding and practical experience. To pass PSM II, you already need to demonstrate the ability to apply Scrum in practice,and only a little more than 8,000 people have passed it. And just over 800 passed the exam that truly confirms a deep understanding of Scrum - PSM III. No more than 10,000 people for millions of teams around the world.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that at least a third of the flow of information about Agile consists of the opinions of people with little practical experience in developing real products. A lot of authors are reaping more of the fruits of people's desire for everything that is fashionable and popular. As a result, someone is trying to overcome the complexity of agilization by resorting to more highly regulated frameworks like SAFe. It is my deep conviction that applying SAFe is a big step back towards deductive (classical, predictive) ways of managing a project, but at least it provides teams with at least some clear path to Agile implementation. Teams are losing the freedom that Scrum values so much, but, on the other hand, lack of experience would not allow them to take full advantage of this freedom.