When the Team's Scrum is More of a Scrum-ish Suggestion
Description
This is a two-panel meme using the 'Well yes, but actually no' format, which features the Pirate Captain from the Aardman Animations film 'The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!'. The top panel has the text 'SO, YOUR TEAM DOES SCRUM?'. The bottom panel shows the Pirate Captain with a hesitant, smiling expression, and the caption reads 'Well yes, but actually no'. The meme humorously captures the common corporate phenomenon where a team claims to follow the Agile Scrum framework, but in reality, only adopts a few ceremonies or practices while ignoring the core principles. This is often referred to as 'Scrum-but' or 'cargo cult Agile,' a situation highly familiar to senior engineers who have experienced numerous half-hearted or misguided attempts at process implementation
Comments
11Comment deleted
Our team's Agile transformation is complete. We've replaced our unpredictable, chaotic waterfall process with an unpredictable, chaotic two-week sprint process
We practice “Scrum-ish”: daily stand-ups for optics, story points converted back to man-months, and a burndown chart stapled to a Gantt - Agile theater so convincing even Jira gave it a Tony
It's called Scrum because after 15 years of 'transformation', we're still doing waterfall with daily standups, but now we have a certified Scrum Master to blame when the two-week 'sprint' takes three months and the retrospective action items from 2019 are still in the backlog
When management mandates 'agile transformation' but still demands fixed-scope waterfall commitments six months out, requires 47-page design documents before any code, and measures success by Jira ticket velocity rather than delivered value - congratulations, you're doing Scrum! Well, technically no, you're doing what seasoned engineers call 'Scrumfall': all the ceremonies of agile with none of the actual flexibility, all the overhead of waterfall with none of the predictability. It's the worst of both worlds, wrapped in a daily standup that somehow takes 45 minutes
We “do Scrum”: standups are status theater, story points map to hours, sprint planning just confirms the Gantt chart, and retros are performance reviews - agile, but actually waterfall in a hoodie
Classic 'ScrumBut': we do daily standups, but actually they're hour-long blame sessions with no action items
We ‘do Scrum’: daily status with 20 people, hour-based estimates, velocity as a KPI, retros via Google Form, and releases gated by a quarterly CAB - textbook Water‑Scrum‑Fall
Failing to plan is planning to fail Comment deleted
So true! I've never encountered a team that did actual Scrum. But lots of teams claiming to do it, and then conceding when asked that they merely let themselves be inspired by a number if Scrum ideas. Personally I also lean more towards Kanban, because Scrum IMO can never work if a manager can pull "the manager card" and kill your sprint in an instant. IMO Scrum requires much more far reaching support from parts of the company outside the actual Scrum team. Often that support can not be gained. And Scrum without the firm timeboxing is no Scrum at all. The timeboxing is meant to protect devs from arbitrary interruptions/changes of/to a sprint. Comment deleted
Muxo texto Comment deleted
Maybe we gotta admit that 9 to 1 scrum isn't practically implementable? Comment deleted