Today, I interviewed a developer/team lead who had a very similar first experience with Scrum. Not very surprisingly, it matched my own so I thought I would share.
The terminology sucks
Two years ago, when Scrum was first proposed, I remember I hated the terminology. Sprint? Backlog? Scrum? Story Points?. It is like a mixture between a sport and fantasy novel. Back then, I liked terms like requirements and project plans. The interviewee had much the same thoughts as me.
My advice, don’t let it be a barrier to entry. Change the names if you want to match your current process initially. (Although I think the names are important because of the mental models they build)
Plan with Scrum, work the same as always
When the interviewee said this, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It isn’t a bad first step into Scrum, but it causes some pain. Handing off to QA after a sprint starts to break down over time. You aren’t working on the most important things first. Etc.
The good thing about Scrum is it doesn’t claim to be right. It claims to be a flexible foundation which will get better each iteration. As long as you are changing the process every sprint based on the pig’s feedback, you will get the process where you want it to be.