I am a software developer and I love software development. I love coming up with clever solutions to problems, I love refactoring parts of a codebase - reduing the number of lines of code and making things more understandable, I even love the boring bits - fixing bugs etc. However I feel that the practice of SCRUM in my current job is preventing me from doing that. Anytime an interesting problem comes up to solve we reduce it into ridiculously small cards like "research how to connect to this API", "Evaluate if we can use this library", "Write a proposal on how to do X" etc.
So a problem which would take 1-2 months for a couple developers working together to solve now takes 6 months. Because we break it into unrealistically small steps and as soon as you finish one step you have to wait for the end of the sprint (2 weeks) and present it, then groom/plan the next step. Its micromanagement to the extreme. No boss would ever be able to micro manage this much but for an entire team participating in scrum this is what happens.
Its impossible for me to sink my teeth into any interesting problems. I feel like the other developers on the team have bought into the scrum mindset and we treat each other like children who need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, there can be no unknowns. For somebody who gets a thrill out of a challenge the SCRUM mentality is driving me crazy. I have brought up some of these issues and nobody else on the team feels the same way. I think I am not a good fit for this team because of that.
The reason why this is a dilemma for me is because everything else about this job is good: the colleagues are nice, the pay is good, the work-life balance is good. But the way we work is frustrating and boring.
Has anybody else experienced something similar? Are we not doing SCRUM right? If so what could we change about how we practice SCRUM?
So a problem which would take 1-2 months for a couple developers working together to solve now takes 6 months. Because we break it into unrealistically small steps and as soon as you finish one step you have to wait for the end of the sprint (2 weeks) and present it, then groom/plan the next step. Its micromanagement to the extreme. No boss would ever be able to micro manage this much but for an entire team participating in scrum this is what happens.
Its impossible for me to sink my teeth into any interesting problems. I feel like the other developers on the team have bought into the scrum mindset and we treat each other like children who need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, there can be no unknowns. For somebody who gets a thrill out of a challenge the SCRUM mentality is driving me crazy. I have brought up some of these issues and nobody else on the team feels the same way. I think I am not a good fit for this team because of that.
The reason why this is a dilemma for me is because everything else about this job is good: the colleagues are nice, the pay is good, the work-life balance is good. But the way we work is frustrating and boring.
Has anybody else experienced something similar? Are we not doing SCRUM right? If so what could we change about how we practice SCRUM?