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Scrum disempowers developers

lambdacambridge.com

341–350 of 382 posts

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#341
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code review definitely is about communication. That’s arguably it’s biggest benefit. The author could test something himself, but code review facilitates a conversation and keeps people on the same page.

My experience is that people often can't test what they've been doing by themselves. They've got blind spots and assumptions that they can't see. They have a mental model for how a feature is supposed to work, and they test that mental model, but they don't test outside of that model.

Yes, this. Programmers are supposed to test their own code. And write tests. You are not supposed to have bugs for what you thought to test.

Tester is for independent check you forgot about or did not knew about. Tester is so that you don't stop testing your code due to too much confidence.

Without testing, programmers tend to not have feedback on bugs, tend to think they don't have them and then tend to produce more bugs in the long term. Not because they are lazy or bad, but because they are normal humans.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you have projects that show 0 progress of any kind after 1 month, but still succeed later? What is happening in that first month?

Research? Experimentation? Foundations?

Pffft. We're talking crud apps here. Has any innovative software ever been developed in "sprints" using "user stories" and "story points" with a "product owner" and a "scrum master"? I doubt it.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#343
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My quip on scrum/agile is that it "ensures mediocre results from mediocre teams." And honestly that is all that most companies actually want/need. Most teams are mediocre and most projects only need a mediocre result. Getting something as good as a mediocre results out of your mediocre teams would be a massive improvement for a lot of place.

I would rephrase it from "mediocre results" to "good enough results" - not everything needs to be a work of art. Especially in the startup world, where there's never enough people to go round, there's a huge value in knowing when you've done enough that the project you're working on is no longer the thing that'll deliver the most value. What agile does when executed right is to fully embrace that, and wrap it in a pr…

When I learned about the concept of "just barely good enough" I was thrilled by it. Lots of people been using the expression "good enough" and to me it feels like a defeatist idea. "They did their best! It's good enough, isn't it?"

http://agilemodeling.com/essays/barelyGoodEnough.html

Given the constraints of the estimate we've made for a story that could really go much longer, except that we've only allocated two days... I think the problem you're hinting at is that different people have different ideas of what the Minimum Viable Product should look like.

Accordingly, on my team where we're all under-trained with respect to Project Management and mostly just making this shit up as we go along, we've identified several other points on the curve.

It's suggested that one should make some nominal efforts to identify, and stop for a sniff along the way to JBGE:

"that's definitely not good enough, try again"

"I'll know it when I see it, but I'm sure that isn't it"

"kinda-sorta good enough"

"that's nearly good enough, except for this one thing..."

Identifying some of these points along the way (and making sure you notice when you've arrived at them) in my opinion is a great way to help ensure you're not actually aiming for points somewhere deep on the wrong side of the curve.

The mediocre team also may have trouble getting to Just Barely Good Enough because of overshooting. But in my experience that's usually not the problem. Nobody is working far past JBGE into the wee hours of the "OMG this is too much, I love it but how long did it actually take?"

If anything, the feature has to be shelved or scrapped, or handed off to someone else, because it's taking too long due to an error in calculation of trajectory. Spending too much time on the wrong things. Incremental progress is the goal, and perfect is the mortal enemy of good.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#344
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both! Strange, >Nuclear submarines are tiny because aircraft carriers are large. And this means submarines are a good investment. Not sure what this has to do with Scrum or the low complexity of Scrum, which fully can be explained in a small book or a week of training. > This is ignoring reality in many cases. A team might develop something domain-specific, like a natural language processing algorithm, but then lat…

> "Not sure what this has to do with Scrum or the low complexity of Scrum, which fully can be explained in a small book or a week of training." Earlier you made a disingenuous comparison of the relative bloat of RUP and Agile RUP in comparison to Scrum. The relative overhead costs of Scrum compared to those other methods don't matter. Only the overhead of Scrum compared to low-overhead and low-formalism methods that…

> by creating an expectation that every engineer ought to be trained as a full-stack engineer,

This is false. Scrum requires the TEAM to be cross functional for the product it develops. It does not require each TEAM MEMBER to be cross-functional. Even 'full stack' (a concept not from Scrum) does not mean 'expert on everything'. Full stack means able to work with front- and backend frameworks for websites. A 'full stack' developer for example will not be expected to be a NLP or a ML expert. The full-stack-developer might have no idea about automated performance tests and he/she usually will not have deep UX skills.

I usually use 'T-shaped' or π-shaped as a requirement for team members. Horizontal skills enable the person to work in a Scrum team with all the added stuff (like automated testing, software repositories, task system, continuous integration, ...). Vertical skills add depths in one or two fields: backend development with Java, frontend development with JavaScript, agile testing, business analysis, database admin/programming, cloud infrastructure, etc.

Looks like you are setting up strawmans - another fallacy.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you have projects that show 0 progress of any kind after 1 month, but still succeed later? What is happening in that first month?

Laying the foundations. Doesn't look like a house even after you've done it.

Exactly. You need the end-to-end backbone working so that you can start adding end-to-end user-visible behaviors on it, a few at a time.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research? Experimentation? Foundations?

Pffft. We're talking crud apps here. Has any innovative software ever been developed in "sprints" using "user stories" and "story points" with a "product owner" and a "scrum master"? I doubt it.

Yeah, I've been on a couple of those. It was XP, technically, not scrum, but we did sprints and user stories and story points, and we had a product owner, and we had a guy who was de facto the keeper of the methodology. It worked really well, too.

And no, it wasn't just crud apps. It was a distributed security auditing tool. Yes, it had a database component, but it was much more than that.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#347
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My quip on scrum/agile is that it "ensures mediocre results from mediocre teams." And honestly that is all that most companies actually want/need. Most teams are mediocre and most projects only need a mediocre result. Getting something as good as a mediocre results out of your mediocre teams would be a massive improvement for a lot of place.

To be honest, that wouldn't be a problem if more companies were up front about it. But every company out there has this idea that they have to hire "the best".

every company out there has this idea that they have to hire "the best".

Maybe in Silicone Valley, but most companies are happy if they can just find a programmer that knows how to program.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#348
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Not sure what this has to do with Scrum or the low complexity of Scrum, which fully can be explained in a small book or a week of training." Earlier you made a disingenuous comparison of the relative bloat of RUP and Agile RUP in comparison to Scrum. The relative overhead costs of Scrum compared to those other methods don't matter. Only the overhead of Scrum compared to low-overhead and low-formalism methods that…

> by creating an expectation that every engineer ought to be trained as a full-stack engineer, This is false. Scrum requires the TEAM to be cross functional for the product it develops. It does not require each TEAM MEMBER to be cross-functional. Even 'full stack' (a concept not from Scrum) does not mean 'expert on everything'. Full stack means able to work with front- and backend frameworks for websites. A 'full sta…

> “Scrum requires the TEAM to be cross functional for the product it develops. It does not require each TEAM MEMBER to be cross-functional.”

It’s naive to approach this in some letter-of-the-law way. Whatever you want to argue that “Scrum says” the reality of what it facilitates & encourages (which is the attenpt to push everyone towards full-stack responsibilities) is different.

> “A 'full stack' developer for example will not be expected to be a NLP or a ML expert.“

This is just not how it plays out in big corporate Agile. They absolutely try to combine specialized skills with front end skills. I work in ML & I can’t tell you how many times I see job ads for “machine learning engineer” requiring experience in React, devops tools, highly specialized database internals, etc., with job descriptions listing all manner of wishlist full stack competencies in addition to PhD-level skill in some machine learning domain. How these places keep thinking the drives and interests required for this can coexist in a single person, I don’t know, but they keep it up. Always in a “fast-paced Agile environment” too.

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#349
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's just me, but I need long periods uninterrupted to work. It's not just the regular status meetings, but other meetings which break up the day to an extent that I can no longer get that.

Yeah, but that's not a scrum thing. Most days, I have the daily stand up (which occurs right after I get to work), and that's it. The one day where we do all the grooming and retro and demo every two weeks is more or less lost, but that's not much of a problem.

What about code reviews?

Re: Scrum disempowers developers

#350
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone tacitly assigns a time value to "points" anyway.

Which is fine. The point (heh) is that the mapping can be adjusted in a feedback loop based on what you actually did in the past.

I've always seen there being a maximum size of a ticket for one sprint. So effectively 8, or, 13, or 21, or whatever, is two weeks, and all the other sizes are some fraction of that, and you end up trying to calibrate how you vote for points based on how long things take.
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