> Now, it may be that stripping developers of power is the best way to create good software (we've all seen the god awful usability of some developer-created software). But let's not pretend that this is empowering for the developer, as the author suggests Scrum is.
That depends on what you mean by "empowering". Do you mean it in the sense that the developer has the final say on what a program does (i.e. feature set)? Do you mean that the developer has the final say on how it is implemented (i.e. architecture)? I would argue that the developer should NOT have the final say on what a product does, but SHOULD have the final say in how it does it. Product designers decide WHAT it does and how it should look to the customer. The developer's job is to turn that product design into a reality using intimate knowledge of technologies and architectures, and alerting designers to the reality of what developing according to their design involves (time + effort), and coming to a compromise if it's too heavy.
> But isn't Agile (of which scrum is part) partly about putting a product out there and seeing how users or customers respond. There is a built in acceptance that some new features are not going to work but you never know until they have been tested out by the end users.
Absolutely. If you build something and it doesn't work for your customers, throw it out. If you can't handle that, you're ego focused, not customer focused.
> That is kind of my point. Developers don't get the chance to write software for other people. They don't have any say how the software actually works, by which I mean the user journeys, the feature set etc because they have been reduced to simply turning the fickle ideas of product owners into a reality.
It seems to me that you want to be the product designer AND engineer. That's fine since you have the abilities of both, but that's not the common case. The ability to write code does not magically confer the ability to design good products.
And even then, scrum will help you because you can track the morphing of your designs into concrete products, do the estimation, prioritization, feature cutting, tracking, and do all the throwing out and redesigning of your own stuff as customers respond positively or negatively to your product refinements. And then at the end of it all you can decide how well the process is working in a retrospective, and refine it to work better for you. Scrum is a meta-process; It helps you BUILD a process that works for you, and provides a convenient starting point that works fairly well in general.
That depends on what you mean by "empowering". Do you mean it in the sense that the developer has the final say on what a program does (i.e. feature set)? Do you mean that the developer has the final say on how it is implemented (i.e. architecture)? I would argue that the developer should NOT have the final say on what a product does, but SHOULD have the final say in how it does it. Product designers decide WHAT it does and how it should look to the customer. The developer's job is to turn that product design into a reality using intimate knowledge of technologies and architectures, and alerting designers to the reality of what developing according to their design involves (time + effort), and coming to a compromise if it's too heavy.
> But isn't Agile (of which scrum is part) partly about putting a product out there and seeing how users or customers respond. There is a built in acceptance that some new features are not going to work but you never know until they have been tested out by the end users.
Absolutely. If you build something and it doesn't work for your customers, throw it out. If you can't handle that, you're ego focused, not customer focused.
> That is kind of my point. Developers don't get the chance to write software for other people. They don't have any say how the software actually works, by which I mean the user journeys, the feature set etc because they have been reduced to simply turning the fickle ideas of product owners into a reality.
It seems to me that you want to be the product designer AND engineer. That's fine since you have the abilities of both, but that's not the common case. The ability to write code does not magically confer the ability to design good products.
And even then, scrum will help you because you can track the morphing of your designs into concrete products, do the estimation, prioritization, feature cutting, tracking, and do all the throwing out and redesigning of your own stuff as customers respond positively or negatively to your product refinements. And then at the end of it all you can decide how well the process is working in a retrospective, and refine it to work better for you. Scrum is a meta-process; It helps you BUILD a process that works for you, and provides a convenient starting point that works fairly well in general.