Recently, I received an e-mail from Scrum Alliance. My Scrum Master Certificate has expired. As expected the e-mail was suggesting to get certified again but why? Agile frameworks no longer deliver what it’s supposed to. From my point of view, they are just another money-making business. I might be wrong but there aren’t many companies using ancient waterfall development cycle anymore. So, what’s the point of this hype?
Why Scrum?
Scrum is an agile framework to improve productivity. It might work well but I think it’s overly complicated. Since it’s complicated enough, there are a ton of websites, alliances, and training. Despite the huge upfront cost, companies have been embracing scrum very eagerly. Some of the companies even have a dedicated scrum master and facilitator role. In a team of 5 people, 2 people trying to increase the productivity sounds weird. Wouldn’t it be much better if they contribute to the development or operations?
Developers are also getting sick of all this agile framework hype. We, as developers, all believe delivering software in iterative steps is good for both customers and software development lifecycle. I have never seen a developer disagreeing with agile manifesto. So, again why do we spend our time and money on the agile frameworks? A simple board for the tasks should suffice, shouldn’t it?
Agile frameworks brought new roles and new businesses. In order to keep these roles and businesses, one needs to continue the hype. What’s more, knowing a framework looks cool. I even saw companies having their own agile framework forked out of the scrum. Voilà! Agile frameworks also bring hope. For some reason, the management might hope Scrum would be the savior of the crappy environment, culture and etc.
Better Spend Time on DevOps
The whole point of software development to produce a product to solve/automate an issue. And, we should produce high-quality software. In order to ensure this, we should better adopt DevOps culture to automate and monitor every aspect of software development. DevOps culture like agile manifesto advocates guidelines, it’s up to you how you apply them. DevOps culture goals are as follows:
- Improved deployment frequency;
- Faster time to market.
- Lower failure rate of new releases;
- Shortened lead time between fixes;
- Faster mean time to recovery. [1]
In consequence, the agile frameworks don’t offer much but they cost a lot in terms of money and time. The hype about agile frameworks is due to economics and illusion. I suggest spending time on DevOps instead. DevOps culture gives an edge over automated deployment, good monitoring and faster time to recovery.