Breaking The Wheel

A picture of a factory, which are parts of institutions, which sometimes create conflict of interest. Also, scrum.

Conflict of Interest: The Fancy Mess of Scrum, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I talked about the functional issues of scrum. In this post, I want to talk about the larger, economic problem with scrum. Namely, what was once an idea designed to support other industries has become an industry unto itself. And with that comes what economists would call a “conflict of interest.”

Read More »
Waves crashing because churn is bad. Christ, I hate alt text.

The Higher Order Consequences of Sprints: The Fancy Mess of Scrum, Part 2

In the Part 1 of “The Fancy Mess of Scrum”, I talked about the flawed intuition behind sprints: how they batch work, obfuscate inefficiencies, and are superfluous in terms of extrinsic motivation. In this post I want to delve deeper into higher order negative externalities that sprints spawn – the consequences of the consequences.

Read More »
A rocket ship lifting off

A Comprehensive Guide to Indie Game Pre-Launch Campaigns

In a day and age where new titles hit the market on a daily basis, being able to stand out from the crowd is super important. In 2016, 4,207 games launched on Steam. Steam doesn’t let you launch games on weekends, so that’s approximately 16 games per day. How do you differentiate yourself from the 15 other games launching at the same time as yours?

Read More »
An image of Bruce Lee who, to my knowledge never used scrum or experienced the flawed logic of sprints

The Flawed Logic of Sprints: The Fancy Mess of Scrum, Part 1

Back in the heady days of 2010, I was a newly minted scrum master, fresh off my training seminar. I was excited by scrum’s potential, but I also took care to maintain some agnosticism. I always told people that scrum was the best production framework I’d seen, but that I would happily kick it to the curb as soon as I found something better. With several more years of experience under my belt, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are, in fact, better ways of managing development. And with that understanding came the further realization that I want to leave scrum behind.

Read More »