Bad practices in Scrum/Agile teams
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Here are some examples of bad practices in Scrum/Agile teams, which can be counterproductive and reduce team autonomy and productivity:
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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.
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Having scrum masters or project managers assign tasks to individual developers rather than letting the team self-organize and developers pull tasks themselves.
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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.
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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
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Having scrum meetings focus heavily on individual developer accountability for completing tasks and "staying busy" rather than delivering customer value.
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(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
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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
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Defining rigid processes and tools that teams must follow rather than letting teams experiment and discover what works best for them.
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Frequently changing priorities mid-sprint and pulling developers off their committed sprint work to work on new "urgent" requests.
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Having project managers or product owners "command and control" sprints rather than collaborating with and empowering the development team.
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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.
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Sacrificing quality and technical excellence by pressuring teams to deliver more features faster, accruing technical debt.