ScrumButting to Hide From Your Problems

“ScrumBut” sounds a bit funny. Behind the wordplay, however, there’s a really common problem in the software industry. 

Original image source Scrum.org

ScrumButs are changes to the Scrum framework that stop teams from getting the full benefits of Scrum. Each part of Scrum, like roles, rules, and timeboxes, is designed to solve common problems and help teams succeed. A very common example of a ScrumBut could be: 

“We use Scrum, but having a Daily Scrum every day feels like too much overhead, so we only hold it once a week.” 

When a ScrumBut happens, it shows that Scrum has revealed an issue within the team, but instead of fixing the root cause, the team changes Scrum to avoid dealing with it. This change hides the problem rather than solving it, so the issue continues to exist, just less visibly. 

Don’t get us wrong - Scrum is not perfect, nor is it suitable for everything. Butt (pun intended), it is also obvious that many of the teams deciding to “modify” Scrum to suit their particular situation don’t actually understand the universal patterns behind the framework and end up failing because their modified methods just hide the problems instead of fixing them.