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Scrum disempowers developers

lambdacambridge.com

261–270 of 382 posts

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#261
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to include 'estimates', which ruins everything (in non-trivial cases, yadda, yadda).

Estimating is my Achilles heel. Always has been. I'm way too optimistic. My workaround was to do jelly bean estimating. Get guesses from everyone, then use the average. Worked surprisingly well. We did other things to meet that target date, honor that estimate, of course. But that's a longer story.

I go one step further: Get guesses from everyone, then use the average multiplied by 3. That lets management talk me down by 1/3rd so they feel they've won something, and I still end up with a little wiggle room.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#262
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum is antithetical to quality. We're 20 years into this experiment? I have yet to even hear someone tell a compelling narrative about doing QA/test in an "agile" context.

I'm not sure where you got that mistaken idea. The Scrum values explicitly call for "shippable quality" by the end of every sprint. Other than that, Scrum doesn't explicitly define testing practices so do it however you like. But I would note that you can't test quality into a product.

Shippable quality to me is a full regression test. That's awful hard to do in the few days a 2 week sprint allows.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#263

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 can probably agree that sprints are usually more realistic than old school waterfall (arguably it depends, like all things) but why do we feel the need to perpetually sprint? A simple kanban board seems to give all the same benefits without the constant pressure and weekly death march to meet the end of sprint commitments.

Because a simple kanban doesn't have any scope/goal, it's just a disorganized TODO list. A sprint/milestone is a way to set goals for the next 2-4 weeks. At the end of the iteration, you redefine new goals according to what would bring the most values to the clients at this new moment T.

If the sprint is not finished, well it's not a big deal. You move the tasks back to the backlog, or in the next sprint, or delete them if it doesn't make sense anymore. And you decrease the number of tasks in the next sprint. You shouldn't feel a constant pressure to finish sprints if the velocity of your team is taken in account correctly.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#264
post #75

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…

I recognize the disfunction. What happens is that the owner of the backlog becomes the controller of how much time gets spent on what. With feature pressure, it's all new features all the time, with no scope to address debt.

> the owner of the backlog becomes the controller of how much time gets spent on what.

Then it's no longer Scrum, correct?

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If you go by actual behavior, it turns out the highest priority at most companies is not actually to improve, to get better at making things for users. It's instead to make managers and executives feel like something is being done without disturbing the power hierarchy. Low-end Scrum fills that need adequately, letting you move marginally in the direction of agility, apply some new labels, and declare "mission acc…

Would love to hear more about practical examples of "barriers to anti-quality". Would this be things like e.g. "Emplace and enforce documentation & project change control process" -- people may want to make changes - but if they don't go through the change request process - they can't have those changes effected?

One example which I actually used to great effect in a previous team was that the team decides the relative allocation of backlog items between new features, fundamental research, maintenance, and refactoring / architectural design. The product owner, no matter how upper management is breathing down their neck, is not allowed to supersede that allocation.

Once we got approval for this, it meant that product owner had to focus on communicating to us why the business had certain priorities and desired certain pivots, instead of just nuking our desired plan of work and superseding it "from on high."

It meant everyone had to trust us as the team that we wanted the business to succeed! (Who'd have thought!) And we weren't going to act childish and just demand backlog items and sprint work that satisfied our preferences for some fun project or some back-burner idea. That, as grownups, we would actually consider when business priorities made sense to supersede our intended plans, and act accordingly.

After a while, we exercised our privilege a few times to ignore or decline "urgent" work that the product owner relayed to us. Instead we invested in much needed refactoring stories, fleshed out more serious design documentations, researched detailed trade-offs between approaches or third party tools we would need in the near future.

Over about a year's time span, this worked incredibly well. The team felt happier and more productive. There was less tension with the product owner since he would not circumvent our plans and dictate new priorities all the time. And people learned they could trust us to understand the underlying business considerations and deploy our team accordingly.

In our company, this was very much as "un-Agile" as it gets. It was the farthest thing from what "Agile" methods meant in the company as there could be, and in large part we only got permission to work this way because our output was in a very specialized domain area that had really critical requirements for some large business initiatives. Most teams could not have possibly negotiated this arrangement.

Like clockwork though, the director of our business unit was surprisingly fired and replaced with no explanation or warning, and the new director stopped us from doing this at that point. It reverted to the usual thing where sprint planning is just a Wheel of Fortune gameshow where you learn the radically new and unplanned pivots you'll be forced to make for the next two weeks. Like trying to win a 100m race by dancing on a DDR mat at the starting line.

Anyway, long story short, the barrier to anti-quality principle was that it's totally the team's discretion as to what work is admitted into the backlog. If the team ignores legit business considerations at their own peril, to goof around with fun stuff, then the team owns that failure. But no matter what, they are not told by the product owner what goes in the backlog, and it must be a sacred right for the team to tell the product owner "no" when management proposes to add work or change direction in a clearly stupid way.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#266
post #45

If you do Scrum like that, you're doing it wrong (I know, no true Sctosman [1], and I know, there are actually dark patterns [2]). I wrote a whole book about "Agile Anti-Patterns" [3]. Most of the book's content is about things that many companies get wrong when they start with agile or lean software development. Because it is very easy to get those things wrong. Yes, those problems are extremely common. Not only wit…

That sounds ridiculously similar to people hanging on to communism/socialism: "the principles are sound, it just hasn't been implemented as intended". Except, just like communism, Scrum has never and will never be implemented "as intended" because that's contrary to our collective evolutionary gifts, and against a developer's desire to find satisfaction in good craftsmanship. A project management methodology building…

True. Scrum is mostly propaganda. I have yet to see it work right and it's been more than 3 different jobs now. The closest was at a big corporation where they sent us all the agile training, had buy-in from management, the PMs, everyone and that was great except that high profile project eventually had PMs whose entire jobs involved evaluating burn down charts to track progress within sprints. So yeah, they actually had people who looked across all the many dev teams doing a roll-up of burn downs for management. That was totally bizarre.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#267
post #42

> Scrum has become the de facto definition of Agile That is a part of the problem. Scrum is very far from Agile. Scrum introduces processes and tools while the Agile Manifesto [1] clearly states: > Individuals and interactions over processes and tools That said, Scrum isn't entirely bad. Its just not what many people think it is. As a tool to change the culture of a company that has been shaped by classical project m…

The Scrum process is a set of tools to push individuals into interaction instead of hiding from each other.

Yes, and sets aside a lot of time for them to interact (read not get things done) for no good reason.

I need interaction maybe 5% in my week. Anything outside of that is just goofing off. Oh and email works great for that sort of thing (interaction, not goofing off).

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#268

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 can probably agree that sprints are usually more realistic than old school waterfall (arguably it depends, like all things) but why do we feel the need to perpetually sprint? A simple kanban board seems to give all the same benefits without the constant pressure and weekly death march to meet the end of sprint commitments.

The business benefit of having a longer planning horizon is that it enables making some commitments outside the agile team. In the real world sometimes that's necessary. A sprint cadence also helps ensure that the team does real retrospectives rather than putting those off. But certainly Kanban can work as well or better in some environments. Pick what works for the circumstances.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#269
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum is antithetical to quality. We're 20 years into this experiment? I have yet to even hear someone tell a compelling narrative about doing QA/test in an "agile" context.

I've never seen QA not be part of the agile process. One of the hallmarks is quality-first. Stories are not done until they've passed all quality gates.

Then I need to work on your teams. I have yet to be on an agile team that did triage, acceptance testing, go/nogo.

No True Scotsman and all that, but it really was different, back in the day.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#270
post #202

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…

Sprints are a shit idea and need to die a horrible death. The number of times we've had to break up some functional requirements for no reason other than to meet some stupid concept isn't funny ultimately it's a waste of time in itself

It's best to break up user stories into small vertical slices and implement them within a single sprint so that you can get early feedback from the customer. That's a great way to uncover misunderstandings about requirements, even though it might seem less efficient. Optimize for rapid value delivery; a little wasted time is acceptable.
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