8 Shortcomings of Agile / Scrum

8 Shortcomings of Agile / Scrum

Scrum, like most things, has its short-comings (although the pros far outweigh the cons in our view). These 8 theses, according to Robert Martin, are some serious problems with Scrum out of the box:

• No Technical Practices: Scrum is a project management framework and doesn’t make any technical recommendations. Bob suggests that teams “need to borrow technical practices from some other method like XP. The suite of technical practices that should be added probably include: TDD, Continuous Integration, Acceptance Testing, Pair Programming, Refactoring.”

• 30 Day Sprints are too long – most trainers now recommend 1-2 week sprints and the majority of teams settle at 2 weeks.

• Scrum Master sometimes turns into Project Manager: Some Scrum Masters use Scrum as a form of micro management and control. “This is not a problem with Scrum out of the box so much as it is a problem with the way scrum sometimes evolves. Perhaps it is related to the unfortunate use of the word "master".”

• Certification in CSM: The Certificate that a Scrum Master, a trained CSM, holds means that on many teams only that person plays the role. Bob prefers the XP approach of rotating the Coach among members of the team.

• Insufficient Guidance Regarding the Product Backlog: “We've learned, over the years, that backlogs are hierarchical entities consisting of epics, themes, stories, etc. We've learned how to estimate them statistically. We've learned how and when to break the higher level entities down into lower level entities. Epics->Themes->Stories->Tasks.”

• Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent: “Scrum over-emphasizes the role of the team as self-managing. Self-organizing
and self-managing teams are a good thing. But there is a limit … Scrum does not describe this with enough balance.”

• Automated Testing: without high quality automated tests it is difficult to work in short cycles and know that stories are really done.

• Multiple Teams: Scrum and generic Agile have little to say about how to scale, many practitioners have ideas but there doesn’t seem to be broad consensus yet.