Bad practices in Scrum/Agile teams

Bad practices in Scrum/Agile teams

Here are some examples of bad practices in Scrum/Agile teams, which can be counterproductive and reduce team autonomy and productivity:

  1. Excessive documentation and note-taking in daily scrum meetings, turning a 15-minute stand-up into an hour-long session full of detailed task tracking and project planning.

  2. Having scrum masters or project managers assign tasks to individual developers rather than letting the team self-organize and developers pull tasks themselves.

  3. Breaking user stories down into highly granular sub-tasks and micro-managing their completion, rather than keeping stories at a higher level and trusting developers to complete them.

  4. Insisting on constant updates regarding task completion updates, as a way to exert gentle pressure to get things done faster - when a lot of programming tasks are complex, with unsure completion times

  5. Having scrum meetings focus heavily on individual developer accountability for completing tasks and "staying busy" rather than delivering customer value.

  6. (Especially in smaller companies) Having managers or even the CEO or CFO attend scrum meetings and voice their opinions... making it impossible for developers to speak freely

  7. Focusing on burn-down charts and praising developers for completing all their tasks by sprint end - thus creating an incentive never to set ambitious goals

  8. Defining rigid processes and tools that teams must follow rather than letting teams experiment and discover what works best for them.

  9. Frequently changing priorities mid-sprint and pulling developers off their committed sprint work to work on new "urgent" requests.

  10. Having project managers or product owners "command and control" sprints rather than collaborating with and empowering the development team.

  11. Excessively focusing sprint retrospectives on places individuals fell short rather than constructively discussing opportunities for overall team improvement. Multi-our retrospectives where information is collected but never acted upon.

  12. Sacrificing quality and technical excellence by pressuring teams to deliver more features faster, accruing technical debt.