Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.

There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.

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hahajk a day ago | parent [-]

What project estimation/management process would you suggest as an alternative?

	▲	ryeats a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Just rank by date needed order on a kanban board and work your way through everything in order. If it's constant fight to meet deadlines it will be clear enough that things are backed up.
	▲	ActorNightly a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Its not so much as estimation as a whole work style, but Make it work -> Make it right -> Make it fast is arguably the best way to go about things, then structure your work around that. Ive done this with greenfield projects when I used to work for Amazon (while still ironically operating under scrum), and was able to get SD2-SD3 promo within 2 years (entering an an SD2). In terms of planning work, you basically allocate people as necessary. The first part deals with a lot of unknowns, so estimation is pointless - basically everyone is on board in terms of getting software up and running and talking to other software. Once you have that, making it right is a lot easier to estimate because you can do a lot more fine grained planning (like for example, a certain team member that worked on a feature can add all the correctness and unit testing way faster than someone who has not) Then making it fast is basically just optimizations, which can be done by a subset of team members while the rest work on adding features (and adding features needs to be done in the same way - make the feature just work, make it correct for all use cases, and then make it optimal)