!rant: what are your experiences with scrum? What was your position?

Scrum master here. I've had many good experiences with scrum, but like any other method it depends on the assignment at hand.

Please tell me more, and I'll try to answer the best I can.

I didn't work in scrum myself, but another team in my office does.
If done right, it's a cool mode to work in.
But apparently, it's hard to not violate it. Planning everything out to the minute makes every sprint fail and the scrum team needs to be independent - having a manager person constantly interfere leads the concept ad absurdum.

@Firedragonweb By overcommitting in each sprint, they are already violating scrum right there.

Many teams use scrum but many uses it wrong.

I'm a certified scrum master (you almost get this for free after taking the course) and many customers of ours 'use scrum'. Almost none of them really do. Sure, they have a task board and do daily stand-up meetings, but that's about it. Planning poker? Never heard of. Burn down chart? Only if it comes with the digital tool they use such as Jira for example. Taking items out of the sprint? Oh no you don't. Retrospective? We have no time for that shit.

If done proper, scrum is great. But only then. Otherwise it is a tool for bad management to hide behind screaming 'BUT WE DO AGILE'.

Why painful?

We tried, we failed, adjusted it a bit to our needs, it seemed all fine... then our tutors decided to screw us over :D

@hasu tutors???

@anon81 it was a bachelors project at uni

@hasu Ahh, ok! Hope you'll have better luck next time. Scrum is, in my opinion, one of the best development processes for most projects involving 3-30 devs.

I can recommend the book by Kenneth Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process, Addison-Wesley. ISBN-13: 978-0137043293

It's pretty easy to read, and gives a very good introduction and gives you the skills needed to either get certified Scrum Master or implement and enforce scrum in a team of up <10 people.

It seems really inefficient

@dermansi it is infact very efficient!