Do teams still use scrum and sprints?

We’re supposed to be doing it, but our scrum master is so bad that we’re not. I find this situation worse than scrum, as it’s just a bunch of unplanned chaos with ever-shifting priorities.

Those terms became way too ambiguous to actually mean anything. Every team does it different.

Some do, some do something they call Scrum but it's their own thing (for better or worse). Others have moved on, recognizing that the best thing about Scrum was that it was agile training wheels and that once they could actually be agile it was time to abandon the trappings.

If a team is coming from something more like the DoD's horrific Waterfall world, then Scrum is probably an improvement but it needs to be seen as a stepping stone, not a destination in itself. It has many problems of its own.

In my 20-something years in the industry I worked for teams that claimed they use scrum, sprints, or some combination of those, multiple times; in all 100% of cases it had nothing to do with how the “real” scrum is supposed to work.

The majority of the teams are actually doing morning meetings which they call “stand-ups” even though everyone is sitting in the conference room or at home, working remotely, and go around the table updating the status.

Some teams have some kind of sprint review once every 2 or 3 or 4 weeks which involves a somewhat deeper discussion of the open and closed work items.

That's as much as people call “scrum” and “sprint” around me.

I've only actually seen and been part of something resembling "agile" team 2 times in my career. Vs many instances of an org only claiming to be agile.

Those 2 instances were actually pretty enjoyable, educational and very productive team work.

I don't see that anymore these days. I only see teams adopting bits of it (mostly "sprints" idea) without actually trying to make the whole thing work. To some degree - WFH was the last nail in the coffin.

To be fair modern big tech are not made for this. Overwhelming levels of bureacracy, accidental complexity, cross org friction just ruins the "agile" ideas and intended dynamics.

Probably not teams from YC xD...or startup. I think scrum will die slowly.

Yes, but not at big companies. SCRUM and Sprints are useful when you're a consultant and the client doesn't actually know what they want to build. When you're working at a software company, it's a red flag if product can't map out what they want.

the actual issue is that teams don't limit WIP to 1 item at a time.

you have people doing 50 things at the same time, then stuff piles up and gets annoying af to manage, and people then have to put what they're working on to the side and address that clog.

just do one thing at a time (you can be doing 10 different projects, but each person should be doing ONE thing with the goal of getting it DONE).