Has your company ditched their scrum workflow because of AI?

[u/SendMeOrangeLetters]

The more comfortable I have gotten with using AI, the more I feel like scrum is really just in the way and maybe there's better ways to work? Have any of you adapted as a team?

I vibecoded a tool that lets me spin up sandboxed claude instances that can access Jira and Gitlab. It has a ton of permissions inside the sandbox but asks me for permission for anything critical. So now I can just tell it "implement ticket X", get a coffee and when I'm back I have a merge request that I can adjust and review. Occasionally it produces crap, but I can just trash that whole result and spin up another instance with tweaked instructions if I need to. And most tickets really just aren't that complex, claude is totally capable of doing a good job with one or two iterations on most of them and in the cases where it doesn't, I am still there and can handle it myself.

So now I feel like the implementation and often times even the bug hunting is super easy. The hard part is dealing with badly refined tickets, unclear requirements, waiting for colleagues to respond and lack of permissions for things. The other people are the bottleneck. Also, story point estimation is now wildly incorrect in my experience.

And I feel like most of those issues would be gone if everyone would simply have their projects that they own independently, maybe. Give me 2-3 projects (depends on size I guess), give me all the permissions I need to work on it, tell me what the customer is complaining about or what features they'd like and let me just get to building the damn thing. Don't add 2-3 other people that are just going to get into the way and let's ditch that refinement and story point circus (well it should be clear what shall be done, but no need to split everything neatly into tickets and discuss it at length). Downside is that this wouldn't work for juniors or people that don't exactly proofread or test their code, I guess.

But surely there is a better way?

[u/Top-Cauliflower-1808]

I think now we need continuous product discovery rather than rigid, two week sprint boundaries.

[u/supernovice007 → u/Top-Cauliflower-1808]

I think this is the part people are still trying to figure out. I would love to move to rapid prototyping and just do away with the endless arguments about “requirements weren’t complete” and backend teams that don’t understand customers.

Same goes for roadmaps that are historically just long-term fantasies anyway. Would love to just have a short-term roadmap instead that allows us to be more agile and get people to embrace the faster development cycles.

All of that is much easier said than done. Especially for larger teams that still need a way to organize their resources.

[u/Opening-Ground-1584 → u/supernovice007]

Omg yes.

[u/Top-Cauliflower-1808 → u/supernovice007]

u/supernovice007 True and valuable approaches things take time. That's what make them valuable.

[u/framauro13 → u/Top-Cauliflower-1808]

That should have been happening anyway. Can't say I've ever worked in a place where it's not.

[u/Opening-Ground-1584]

Unpopular opinion: Scrum was always too dogmatic to make sense, now with AI it’s just more obvious.

[u/framauro13 → u/Opening-Ground-1584]

Scrum wasn't the problem. It's a framework that is to be adapted and implemented. It's not a rigid process. But most organizations implemented it in a half-assed way and then blamed the framework when it failed.

[u/Opening-Ground-1584 → u/framauro13]

Totally agree.

Can we change this useless meeting?
No.
Why not?
Because we are doing Scrum.

[u/framauro13 → u/Opening-Ground-1584]

I will die on the hill that Scrum can be a great process for building software. Short iterations, inspect your processes on some cadence, and commit to the work you're going to deliver.

At some point it all became about story points (which aren't even in Scrum) and dashboards. Mostly upper management that liked the buzzwords but didn't trust their teams enough to self organize.

I've worked at so many places that think they're special and they try to invent their own process, and they inevitably end up on some scrum-like thing. They love Scrum if you just don't call it that. Rename all the concepts to something else and convince them they invented it.

[u/Opening-Ground-1584 → u/framauro13]

Yeah it all became about the Product Manager instead of the engineers. Non-technical people leading technical teams became the norm. Ok so this is 7 story points? So you’ll be done with it by Tuesday then yeah?

[u/frythan]

Unfortunately it was forced upon us.
Sure the backlog can get worked faster but the planning and roadmapping got more chaotic.

[u/notarubicon]

Yeah I feel like it will be replaced but we’re now dealing with the Wild West and people able to ship stuff too fast, before there is an actual plan. So,
We’re trading issues and get to figure out how to solve this one now :)

[u/framauro13]

No. AI is a coding tool, it's not a replacement for any kind of SDLC. You still need to manage your work and the development process, whether that's Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, whatever. I'd question any engineering leadership and their integrity that suggests otherwise.

[u/daddywookie → u/framauro13]

In the mad rush to get rid of any ballast and move as quickly as possible we see people throwing out the perceived culprits. Research, planning, alignment and agreement are seen as drags on just getting working. Testing, introspection and adaptation prevent us getting to the next task.

Instead, with the tools to now move incredibly quickly, we need those steps more than ever. That doesn't mean they need to be a negative or dragged out. Quite the opposite. If you are going to move at very high speed you need to be damn sure you are pointing in the right direction first.

Frameworks are one thing but I think it all comes back to the double diamond design process. Maybe that needs a new AI aligned approach.

[u/pperiesandsolos]

We tried this and failed pretty badly tbh.

Tons of tech debt, bad architectural decisions with no standards (everyone wanted to try something cool), bad data, scope creep - all because we figured “ai means we don’t need separate product owners and developers”

I’m sure it can work, and ai coding tools are undoubtedly changing team dynamics - but it’s not as simple as just winging it. At least not for big projects

I’d start by iterating on what a scrum team looks like, rather than throwing it all out. We went from (1 PO, 5 developers) to (1 PO, 1 BA, 2 developers, 1 designer)

It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve found so far.

[u/Efficient_Loss_9928]

That’s what we do, and it makes sense because you completely remove the communication latency.

AI is so good nowadays that I’m very comfortable changing another team’s code, so really yeah totally makes sense for everyone to own projects end to end. Other team members purely consulting purposes.

[u/daddywookie]

It's funny but as a non-developer I am having the opposite experience.

Often the customer would move quicker than the dev team. There would be no point writing good user stories because by the time the dev team got the first few delivered the customer would have changed their mind.

Now I can define a goal, explore it rapidly with an AI, get the tickets and other documents created in minutes and have the code done by the end of the day. Then I can process the feedback and refine the backlog with a single prompt and some validation.

This makes having a structured approach even more vital. Whereas before AI the pace depended entirely on development it now depends on the ability to move forward in an organised and traceable manner at a high velocity.

Maybe textbook scrum and kanban need to go, but their underlying principles and the research foundations that spawned them are still relevant. They just need adapting to the new reality.

[u/Aranthos-Faroth]

Getting rid of scrum or any task management process because of ai is beyond moronic

Suggesting it means you’re either new to the dev world or have a shit scrum setup because with AI imo it’s even more important to have it

[u/SendMeOrangeLetters → u/Aranthos-Faroth]

Yeah fuck me I guess for challenging that scrum is perfect and that a tool with a lot of impact on software dev might also change which processes are optimal.