In my thinking about Strawberries, I’m wondering what issues folks have with Scrum, good or bad. Please tell me. I’ll mention some ways here.

I wrote yesterday, in The Fall of Scrum about some signs and portents that suggest that the world of Scrum and faux-Agile may be changing. Certainly there is plenty of change going on in the world at large, and that is surely going to impact how work is done.

I think we can be sure that there are Scrum/Agile efforts that go quite well, and that there are some that go quite poorly. We do not know the distribution. Worse yet, there are surely situations where management is at least somewhat satisfied, but the teams are unhappy, or, perhaps even the other way around.

My own primary interest is the happiness and health of dev team members, the programmers, analysts, testers, domain experts, writers, artists, and whoever all goes into really making the product. The “makers”, who make the made. I see plenty of tweets from makers who are not happy under the thing they experience as “Scrum” or “Agile”. Now, if the people aren’t happy, someone is doing something “wrong”, but that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to hear from as many makers as I can, telling me about their experience doing “Scrum” or “Agile”. Good experiences or bad, as current and specific as possible. I’m interested in questions like these:

  • What “method” are you nominally using? (e.g. Scrum, SAFe)
  • What is your role? (e.g. maker, scrummaster, manager, …)
  • Based on your study of the method, how well is your organization using it?
  • How happy are you in your work situation, as regards your “method” and other dimensions?
  • What are the key causes of your level of happiness?
  • What contributes to your happiness? What detracts from it?

Or just go wild. I’m trying to get an overall sense of what’s out there, and perhaps a hint at the dimensions.

What will I do with this information? Well, it will certainly serve as a basis for future articles. And I’ll try to use it to influence people in the Agile/Scrum Industrial Complex, though my results there are … mixed isn’t quite the term … not very encouraging … no that’s not it … pretty poor so far.

You can get me this information by tweet @ronjeffries, or by email ronjeffries at acm dot org. I will try to at least acknowledge all messages, but can’t promise a long or involved answer to your concerns, because I’m hoping to get a lot of messages. And there’s always AgileMentoring, which offers conversation with like-minded folks including Mike Vizdos and me.

To help me get a good picture, please pass this article to others who might not otherwise see it and whose voices need to be heard.