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Scrum disempowers developers

lambdacambridge.com

221–230 of 382 posts

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#221

Like any and every business theory, Scrum has one or two core ideas that are awesome, but could be explained adequately in a paragraph or two. This does not sell books and consulting, so it evolved into a field of its own. The fact that there is so much B.S. in Scrum doesn't mean that it has nothing of value to offer, though. Here's what I get out of it: 1. Sprints are a better way to organize than Waterfalls. I've e…

I'd like to add priority next to progress and problems in the second item. Being able to pull things in and out of planning is one of the biggest advantages over waterfall.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#222

I find this article lacking, because it makes all of the same mistakes typical of these bandwagon anti-Scrum articles. Despite working in a a Scrum team, I recognise literally nothing of the problems that are described. Our product owner works closely with both commercial and development groups to build the backlog. Pressure to build good technical solutions is reasonably balanced with commercial requirements. The de…

> There is a weird underlying assumption in these kinds of articles that implicitly seems to assume that Scrum will somehow turn a bad team into a good one. This assumption starts with one of the earliest Scrum pioneers, Jeff Sutherland. He writes quite clearly that he doesn't care about an individual's performance, but rather a team's performance. He also talks at length about how poor performing teams can be turned…

You are misinterpreting. Scrum is designed to cure disfunctions that turn good developers into bad teams.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#223

I think the value I get out of Scrum, or XP, or any other methodology, is two-fold. Firstly, it gives you a set of tools to use -- sprints, TDD, product owners, and so on -- that should work well together. To use them well, I think you both need an understanding of how each of those tools supports some idea or principle that the methodology promotes, and whether or not you think that principle is important for your t…

Not disagreeing (though not a fan of Scrum or Kanban), but can you elaborate why TDD is part of the "agile toolset"?

I've seen this claim multiple times and it's never made sense to me. I do TDD on side projects where there's not even a hint of "agile."

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm too optimistic Have you ever thought much about why, though? When I was young, I was super optimistic - and I got burned by all of the surprises (including the underspecified or unstated requirements), so I started to estimate pessimistically based on experience. But then I got stuck in this loop: "How long will this take?" "Probably two weeks" "What? Why two weeks? Why not two days? We only have two days. Say…

I have thought about it. A lot. I'm told I work too slow, dive too deep. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do just 80%, "good enough". When I was a kid, I published shareware. After getting a few 3:00am wake up calls from irate customers, I said "never again". I spent 15 years designing, engineering away technical support calls. It mostly worked. Later on... When my team(s) burned a CD, we rarely had to issue patch…

This. Figuring out how to stop at 80% is a skill I'm struggling to learn. And I don't mean "learn to half-ass things"; in the vast majority of cases 80% is more than good enough to get the job done.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#225

I find this article lacking, because it makes all of the same mistakes typical of these bandwagon anti-Scrum articles. Despite working in a a Scrum team, I recognise literally nothing of the problems that are described. Our product owner works closely with both commercial and development groups to build the backlog. Pressure to build good technical solutions is reasonably balanced with commercial requirements. The de…

No, it's the other way around: those arguing against SCRUM don't have to tell their reasons (bad experience suffices), but SCRUM proponents must come forward with logically sound and coherent arguments pro-SCRUM in the first place.

What if scrum proponents are busy having successful experiences, but are open to an argument convincing them that they are not?

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm too optimistic Have you ever thought much about why, though? When I was young, I was super optimistic - and I got burned by all of the surprises (including the underspecified or unstated requirements), so I started to estimate pessimistically based on experience. But then I got stuck in this loop: "How long will this take?" "Probably two weeks" "What? Why two weeks? Why not two days? We only have two days. Say…

I have thought about it. A lot. I'm told I work too slow, dive too deep. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do just 80%, "good enough". When I was a kid, I published shareware. After getting a few 3:00am wake up calls from irate customers, I said "never again". I spent 15 years designing, engineering away technical support calls. It mostly worked. Later on... When my team(s) burned a CD, we rarely had to issue patch…

Customers may talk about hating bugs, but when you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, 95% of the time they'll buy buggier software with more features.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#227
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? Scrum fixes all bad management practices? What are you saying here? I was questioning your original statement that I mistakenly thought Scrum should fix bad management practices. I do not think that, and no part of that is a criticism of Scrum. The criticisms are other things. Your follow-up just seems confused about your own parent comment. > "There we need evidence that it is actually so. Haven't seen any c…

> I've seen a lot of that evidence, in threads like this, in the original post, and also empirical evidence in my own work experience with Scrum as both a developer and a manager across several organizations of various ages and sizes. 'evidence' found in Hackernews posts? > I'm confident the evidence shows zero efficacy this will surely help with selecting evidence, given that you know already the findings. > This is…

> "How about deciding what you want to say: a) scrum makes it worse or b) scrum does not help?"

Both!

> "Really? Before we have worked with RUP and Agile RUP. Compared to that Scrum is tiny."

Nuclear submarines are tiny because aircraft carriers are large. And this means submarines are a good investment.

> "The team should be cross-functional based on the product the team develops."

This is ignoring reality in many cases. A team might develop something domain-specific, like a natural language processing algorithm, but then later the product requires a web service and a front-end. As a result, management requires specialist machine learning researchers to spend their time writing front-end widgets, because "Scrum says to be cross-functional" (and don't even think of saying the no-true-Scotsman reply, "but that means they're doing Scrum wrong!" Scrum leads them to that type of thinking).

In many cases, the different functionalities for a single product should absolutely not be embedded in the same team. Rather, much like in software design, it's important to separate concerns, and have teams with modular and clearly defined boundaries between their different and complementary skills. Then for a single product, parts of it will be worked on by different teams that each have specialized skill in one area, and can operate independently of each other because it's not muddied by an artificial requirement for "cross-functional" skills.

Some other times, Scrum-like cross-functionality is good. That's why Scrum is wrong to unilaterally prescribe it for every product and every situation. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, and teams need to be empowered to customize according to whatever the case at hand needs, not the unilateral model that Scrum tries to impose.

> "This actually presumes that I identify successful practices which can be applied in many projects. We did."

But then what do you say to people who have identified successful practices over decades that conflict with Scrum and are mutually exclusive with Scrum's approach. Scrum worked for you. Great. It didn't work for me.

What's your reaction to that fact? If your reaction is to say, "well then you did Scrum wrong, because it always works" then you are just denying the premise that any other solution could be possible, and it absolutely is a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Can you at least admit that some people have earnestly tried Scrum in a situation when Scrum is advertised to work, like iterative software development, and they did not "do it wrong" yet still found that it didn't work for their team?

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#228
post #74

Like any and every business theory, Scrum has one or two core ideas that are awesome, but could be explained adequately in a paragraph or two. This does not sell books and consulting, so it evolved into a field of its own. The fact that there is so much B.S. in Scrum doesn't mean that it has nothing of value to offer, though. Here's what I get out of it: 1. Sprints are a better way to organize than Waterfalls. I've e…

My experience is that a good team does a good job. A bad team doesn’t. I think the focus on methodologies is to get a good result from an uneven team. Companies desperately want to treat programmers like standardized workers that can be mixed and matched as needed. The siren song of the methodology is that maybe it can achieve that goal. I have never seen this work in practice. There are no quick fixes. People can im…

Agreed. I've seen a lot of "good practices, methodologies, processes, etc", but none of them even tries to address what is, often times, the most critical issue: a team of good software engineers. Instead of endless meetings and bullet points about how to handle a Jira ticket, maybe focus on how to handle pointers?!. I've really had colleagues who don't know how to program in C and when asked about it said "I don't even want to learn it, we have all this tools and methods", but their title says "C embedded engineer" or thereabout.

I can also see the business point of view in this. You want switchable puzzle pieces. Take this developer from this project and move him to that project. This developer knows X, Y, Z and that project needs X, Y and Z. So it's all nice and well. Only it doesn't seem to work in practice.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#229
We got rid of most processes. I "think" what we do now is Kanban - I say "think" because I haven't looked at Kanban closely really. But we look at our board, and everyone just works on things, and when they are done, we help assign a new task. When code is done, we roll to QA, when that is done we merge, and release to production. Issues that get worked on are usually in production in a couple days. This excludes major refactoring work or risky items. Those are handled in special unique ways.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#230
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UML comes out of a different culture of development, that of the Rational software crew. They had their own much more heavyweight process than the Agile folks: RUP, or the Rational Unified Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software#UML_and_RUP There was a little overlap; in particular, Martin Fowler wrote an intentionally thin book called "UML Distilled". But the UML world was generally heavy on both up…

Thanks for your misc comments in this thread. This particular comment, the "UML Distilled" reminder, triggered a few hindsight notions. Much like XML and J2EE tainted Java, I'm now having trouble distinguishing between UML and OOAD. Though I preferred Fusion to UML, I'm now wondering if any OOAD based methodology had a chance. "...thinking that the main value of UML was in having a consistent language..." Guilty. For…

I think "accepting the chaos" is fair. We've accepted it because it works - or rather, Scrum is about doing the minimum amount of "bringing order" necessary to move forward, and no more. Which makes sense - people like the idea of tidiness, but you shouldn't put more effort into organisation than you're getting out of it.
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