Why Do People Dislike Scrum

“You know my project is moving into Scrum and my life is going to be over soon” or “You know I am moving into a new project where they do Scrum; bye bye my social life.”

This is a very common belief in every individual who gets allied to Scrum for the first time. The reason? Criticism from those about Scrum who do not understand it or know how to implement it. So instead of looking into how they could develop themselves, they blame any failures or drawbacks on the framework and make it the villain.

I have worked with several Scrum teams and there are 3 serious concerns I have always seen that cause people to take on this outlook.

1. They heard it from someone and just passed it on to the next person without even doing any validation on their end; like the fake messages and news that flood WhatsApp and Facebook timelines. Some simple online reading can clarify lots of delusions and misinterpretations people have about Scrum.

2. People working in Scrum don’t know what Scrum is. This is another leading prevalent factor in mainstream IT engineers and management. Everyone wants to move into this “promising” way of developing software, but no one wants to unlearn what they've spent a lifetime learning. Scrum or Agile is a mindset which is too diverse from the old-fashioned way we have been doing things. It's management’s accountability to empower people on Scrum before moving them into it. By the time people absorb it the hard way, their attitude towards it converts, and not in a good way. So don’t shy away from saying, “I don’t know.”

3. Extra work. More than anything else, people try to hide the extra work they do that is not part of the estimates. This is incorrect on so many levels. The outcome is late night slogging and weekend work. Every single minute of the work week should be part of your estimates. And if it’s not part of your task, then why are you even doing it? I have seen people estimating that a task will take 6 hours, even if they spent 11 hours on a similar task in the previous Sprint. Why? Because they “believe” that the PO or Scrum Master won’t approve of this deviation. Or, they think they are not allowed to change the estimates. Speaking up and opening up is the key here without being scared of denial.