I help companies use AI securely & purposefully | AI Consultant | Software Developer | Professional LinkedIn Gadfly
At the turn of the century, give or take a few years, you could become a Certified #Scrum Master by sitting in a room for two days. The Scrum Alliance, then captained by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, would give you a CSM simply for taking the course. Well, paying for it, really. The course was usually taught by a subcontractor who had also taken the course who may or may not have ever developed a product of any kind. There was no exam, no mandatory field hours, nothing. This isn't the case today, so no need to get your pitchfork, but this strategy had profound effects in the software development landscape. 1. Scrum became immensely popular, far outstripping other approaches to increasing agility in software development. For many, Scrum and Agile were just two words for the same thing. Insofar as "agile" is a market, Scrum dominated it. 2. The very people who were now certified to make sure teams were doing Scrum well had a very surface level understanding of Scrum, much less agility in general. For many, it was the first time they'd even heard of agile software development. You put these things together, and you can guess what happened: Widespread adoption and enforcement of a body of practices with very little insight into why those practices existed, what value the practices were supposed to achieve, what principles those practices were based on - or any of the information that would tell you how to modify a practice without jeopardizing the value or if you should even be doing that practice to begin with. You ended up with rote performances of practices that were typically and unconsciously molded back into the organization's existing ways of thinking and doing (daily scrums as status reports, anyone?) with the thought that the touted benefits would just magically happen - conjured up by performing the right rituals. Or ceremonies, if you prefer. And even those desired benefits were varied because, again, nobody understood why they were doing those things. Company officers wanted development to go faster and cost less. Developers wanted less hassle and stress. Users wanted products that were effective, valuable, and easy to use. Scrum was sold as the thing that would accomplish all of these things, and it rarely accomplished any of them for anybody. Into this confusion and disappointment stepped certain grifters who, instead of guiding people back to first principles, leaned into the situation, offering more and more specific practices - usually bastardizations and unhelpful mutations of #XP practices - to help organizations "do Scrum right" without actually helping them become more agile. And I would say this is still the most common scenario for Scrum using organizations today. Not because Scrum is still that way or taught that way or marketed that way, but because of the widespread propagation of it under these terms that seeded the soil years ago. What you're seeing today is the outcome of inertia.