Re^3: Selling swimsuits to a drowning man

[mr_mischief]

It was you who started the thread, so it's odd that you find it so distasteful a thread.

Scrum isn't for designing rocket trips to the moon. Not all development happens on projects of that scale. There are projects for which it works and ones for which it'd be downright silly.

Scrum is for those quick-turnaround improvements on chronically under-specified projects. Not all developers work on waterfall projects with everything designed well by engineers then implemented in code. Lots of development is "we want this" and two weeks later "we want that". Scrum is a way to deliver "this" quickly and then switch to working on "that" rather than delivering a wrong "this" that had lots of things still underspecified six months late.

It's a system of encouraging quick turnaround of small changes. Planning up front that's not perfect results in lots of changes later anyway. If you have to throw away work it's better to scrap a couple of weeks' worth than a couple of years' worth. It's just a way to deal with not having a perfect understanding of what your customer needs up front in the first place. This is a good thing because the customer usually doesn't know what they want up front, either. On top of that, the customer's needs can change during development if you take too long to deliver.

If that's not the type of project you're working to deliver, then it shouldn't be delivered under Scrum.