(2018-03-27) Jeffries Dark Scrum The Case Against The Sprint

Ron Jeffries: Dark Scrum: The Case Against the Sprint. We’ve already talked about the fact that Sprints are not necessary to teams who are working well: pulling one story, and swarming on it, then another and another, works better, my friends and I believe, than Sprints. (There are good reasons to continue a regular cadence of planning, and certainly of review and retrospection.) But that’s not much of a case. What else ya got?

So management comes down at least every couple of weeks, examines what the team has done, finds fault with it, puts pressure on them to do more and better

Frankly this result is almost inevitable. In companies with this kind of management style – that is, probably, most companies – Scrum’s Sprint is harmful to actual human beings.