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mburnamfink 's review for:
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by J. J. Sutherland, Jeff Sutherland
Good management is good management. Cargo cult gibberish is cargo cult gibberish. And the intersection of the two is Scrum, a management philosophy that promises orders of magnitude improvements everywhere.
Some parts of scrum are obvious. Spend time doing things that are valuable to the customer. Delivery that value quickly and incrementally. Don't get bogged down in monumental efforts tied to thousands of pages of documentation that no one has actually read, or actually understands. The basic unit of action is a small, 5-7 person, cross-functional team, capable of moving a project from conception to done. Happy is contagious, and happy teams are effective teams.
But the cargo cult elements of scrum are in the jargon, which obscure the hard points of writing code. Story points, daily-stand ups, and sprint cycles are all well and good, but if you haven't figured out what you're doing and why, it doesn't matter. Small teams can self-organize, but what about coordinating big organizations and big projects? And while cross-functionality seems very important, most conventional businesses are organized in top-down, 'disciplinary' silos (sales, IT, development, finance, etc), so how do product owners and scrum masters interact with the conventional management hierarchy. And of course the big questions remain largely unanswered. How does a team figure out what objectives and capabilities are important, and how do you do a proper sprint retrospective to capture what went right?
And finally, some of the examples Sutherland uses are not quite right. There's a lot of pointing to Boyd's OODA loop, which Sutherland says he learned as a RF-4 pilot in Vietnam, except John Boyd only developed the OODA loop after his stint as Commander of 56th Combat Support Group in 1973. And Sutherland points to Valve as a company which has successfully implemented scrum, which may be true, except that despite sitting on a literal neverending pile of money in the form the Steam store, Valve hasn't released a significant game of its own since 2013. Rich Geldritch, a disgruntled former manager, alleges Valve is a morass of abusive management and inefficiency.
This book is enthusiastic, but cheering 'hip hip hooray being great!' is a far cry from actually being great.
Some parts of scrum are obvious. Spend time doing things that are valuable to the customer. Delivery that value quickly and incrementally. Don't get bogged down in monumental efforts tied to thousands of pages of documentation that no one has actually read, or actually understands. The basic unit of action is a small, 5-7 person, cross-functional team, capable of moving a project from conception to done. Happy is contagious, and happy teams are effective teams.
But the cargo cult elements of scrum are in the jargon, which obscure the hard points of writing code. Story points, daily-stand ups, and sprint cycles are all well and good, but if you haven't figured out what you're doing and why, it doesn't matter. Small teams can self-organize, but what about coordinating big organizations and big projects? And while cross-functionality seems very important, most conventional businesses are organized in top-down, 'disciplinary' silos (sales, IT, development, finance, etc), so how do product owners and scrum masters interact with the conventional management hierarchy. And of course the big questions remain largely unanswered. How does a team figure out what objectives and capabilities are important, and how do you do a proper sprint retrospective to capture what went right?
And finally, some of the examples Sutherland uses are not quite right. There's a lot of pointing to Boyd's OODA loop, which Sutherland says he learned as a RF-4 pilot in Vietnam, except John Boyd only developed the OODA loop after his stint as Commander of 56th Combat Support Group in 1973. And Sutherland points to Valve as a company which has successfully implemented scrum, which may be true, except that despite sitting on a literal neverending pile of money in the form the Steam store, Valve hasn't released a significant game of its own since 2013. Rich Geldritch, a disgruntled former manager, alleges Valve is a morass of abusive management and inefficiency.
This book is enthusiastic, but cheering 'hip hip hooray being great!' is a far cry from actually being great.