Scrum is Broken: Distance Discord
Decoding Agile's Next Iteration: Pulse Development
If you're a software engineer working in a remote team, you're probably familiar with the following scenario:
6:30 AM: Your alarm goes off. You hit the snooze button once, then twice. But you know you can't keep putting it off - you have a daily standup in an hour.
You log in to your video conferencing app and join the call. Half of the team is already there, looking bright and bushy-tailed. It is already afternoon for them anyway. The other half is still in bed, or at least they look like they are.
You take your notes and start sending emails to arrange ad-hoc meetings for the things you wanted to take offline. This rush is because you have a precious two-hour window of core working hours when everyone on the team is available, between 07:00 and 09:00.
After the standup, you have a few minutes to catch up on emails and Slack messages before your next meeting. But then you realize that you need to start working on the sprint planning meeting for later today. And then there's the retrospective meeting tomorrow. And don't forget about backlog grooming.
You sigh. It's going to be a looong day.
If you find this scenario all too familiar, it's likely because you are part of the majority in the technology sector. Chances are, you are a member of a dev team, which includes colleagues from various parts of the world, and you find yourselves adhering to the traditional Scrum rituals.
If you're reading this, you're probably feeling my pain. Scrum is a great methodology for managing software teams, but it's not without its flaws. And one of the biggest flaws is that it's not well-suited for remote teams.
The Challenges of Scrum for Remote Teams:
Time Zone Differences: Coordinating meetings and collaboration across different time zones can be a logistical nightmare, disrupting the flow of work and causing fatigue among team members.
Communication Hurdles: Effective communication, particularly for conveying complex technical concepts, becomes more challenging when team members are geographically dispersed.
Lack of Collaboration: Scrum thrives on close collaboration, which is difficult to achieve when your team is scattered worldwide.
Is Scrum Really Broken?
Having managed Scrum teams for 15+ years, I've experimented with various approaches, from local teams to hybrid models.
After all these years, I would say, well… scrum is broken.
If you consider the values and rules of Scrum, it creates a strong team bond, implying that Scrum works best when team members are in the same time zone or, even better, in the same office. I've even encountered challenges within teams that share the same time zones but are located in different cities. I've tried everything: whiteboards, digital dashboards to recreate the feeling of being in the same room, and even large TV screens. However, it doesn't allow you to fully maximize the value of Scrum unless you are physically in the same room.
While applying scrum, I have mixed feelings: On one hand, there's the satisfaction of alignment and ensuring nothing is overlooked. On the other, there's the nagging guilt of imposing overhead on your team.
After years of trial and error, it's clear that Scrum, in its current form, is ill-suited for the realities of remote work. As remote and distributed teams become the norm in the software industry, it's time to reevaluate our methodologies.
Embracing the Future of Remote Development:
The software industry is increasingly reliant on remote work. Scrum's values and principles foster strong team bonds, but these bonds are best forged within the same time zone or office space. Even within the same time zone but different locations, challenges persist.
However, this doesn't mean we should revert to the pre-Internet era of colocated teams. Instead, we must evolve our methodologies to align with modern remote work practices. The next generation of development methodologies should be remote-first, designed to accommodate and optimize remote collaboration.These methodologies should be:
Asynchronous
Flexible
Collaborative
Scrum, while effective in many scenarios, falls short in the context of remote teams. The future of software development methodologies lies in designing approaches that cater specifically to remote work.
Stay tuned for my next essay, where I delve deeper into the challenges of Scrum in remote teams and propose innovative solutions to address them.