Should we still learn Scrum?
In my ~software development journey~, I have been adamant about staying on top of technology trends, popular frameworks, and ways to make myself a competitive candidate for the crazy world that is the junior engineering employment candidate pool!
In this journey, I try and write about trends I see, or concepts I notice in applications that I’m not 100% familiar with. One of these is Scrum. I first heard of it from a few LinkedIn connections, quickly followed by several articles shortly thereafter discussing being a “scrum master”. To me, scrum is a silly word, but who knew it could be so impactful to your day to day coding.
I wasn’t going to write a blog on this concept, but earlier today I came across another blog that said that scrum is dying and it’s not something that we need to learn anymore. I can’t say I agree or disagree, but maybe this article can help you decide if this is something that you want to devote your time to!
What is scrum?
In very simple terms, scrum is a framework that helps teams work better together. Teams that utilize scrum are encouraged to learn through their experience, reflect on wins and losses that have occurred during their day, and organize during problems. It is thought that doing this will help teams build together, lean on each other for assistance (which will mitigate any issues that come along with embarrassment or feeling of inadequacy which are very normal in the engineering space). People often compare agile and scrum because of similar goals, however the main difference is that agile is a mindset where scrum is a framework. It is common knowledge that you won’t know something when you first are introduced to it (and this can be with regard to a project, a framework, language, or any work assignment) and scrum will assist with this.
There are three roles that are pertinent for success utilizing scrum. You have the product owner, scrum master, and the development team. With this, it’s important to note that the scrum team can be cross-functional and does not only include engineers. It can be UX designers, operational engineers, etc. In addition to this, the idea is to work in “sprints”, meaning this is the length of time that a team works together to accomplish the goal. During this time, it’s also important to continue with daily scrum or stand ups,
Scrum is mainly used in software development teams, and is often compared to an agile project management framework. It’s a group of meetings, roles, and teams that helps create hierarchy and structure for the scrum framework.
The reason why people believe that scrum is irrelevant to learn is that you will not see any major changes from it if used for an extended period of time. It is a great way to initially start a new routine to bring changes into your work space, but if repeatedly done the same over time, you will no longer see additional changes if sticking to this schedule.
Some also argue that people stick to the workflow too rigidly, or not enough, which defeats the purpose. Another argument states that scrum lacks the rules and gives too much room for discussion, with too much focus on discussion and not enough on actual attempts for improvement.
At this point, it’s up to you to figure out what works best! Something you may notice when looking at jobs is the request for an “agile work environment”. Maybe this would be something that works best for your job? Try it out and see!
