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Scrum is fragile, not Agile

dennisweyland.net

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Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#51

Post by rileymat2 »

anon1m0us wrote: post #33
colordrops wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time. Could you elaborate?

You're asked to deliver a feature that would take 4 weeks to implement without tech debt in two weeks. This requires sacrifices like ensuring network connections remain alive, handling exceptions, optimizing queries, abstracting functions for re-use, handling all the data input scenarios, etc. This creates a confusing code-base with lots of IF statements, copy/pasted code, data modifications from several areas of the…

>You're asked to deliver a feature that would take 4 weeks to implement without tech debt in two weeks.

There is something odd with this, if you did the estimation. Shouldn't the story points/sizing/estimates preclude this?

Doesn't the team pick the items for the sprint that they think they can complete?

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#52

Post by RyJones »

brightball wrote: post #22
wpietri wrote: post #12

He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption. I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable. I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies have other priorities than being effective, so the…

Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time.

Scrumfall is, sadly, widespread

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#53

Post by roseandking »

thrower123 wrote: post #8
icelancer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Daily standup I have never worked at a company where this actually goes right and could not be replaced by [insert ticketing system here]. We use Basecamp to do daily check-ins on a very high priority issue, if we have one, which we usually don't.

Managers are the only people that like daily standups, so far as I can tell. I've never figured out why you couldn't just do it over slack or equivalent. It's massively inefficient to get everyone to meet up in the morning.

We do it in person on MWF and slack TTh. I find slack updates to be both more effective and more efficient. It is obviously why it is more efficient; but it’s actually more effective because unfortunately I am one of those many people who simply drift off when in a meeting, and putting updates down in writing helps infinitely.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#54

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

anon1m0us wrote: post #32
brightball wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time.

Waterfall was coined by a paper discussing why waterfall wasn't a good way to do software projects. You aren't wrong, either. I found Scrum to be a series of waterfalls that weren't well thought out. "Iterative Design" essentially meant, "We aren't sure what the button should do exactly, but we know we need it there and it kinda has to do this and we'll figure the rest out for the next iteration." That caused so many…

This mirrors my experiences to a tee.

The most upsetting experience in my career thus far was being belittled by an incompetent project manager.

"How could it possibly take that long? How do you not know how long it will take?"

The happiest times of my career have been when we're lacking a PM -- coincidentally the most successful!

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#55

Post by Aeolun »

brightball wrote: post #22
wpietri wrote: post #12

He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption. I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable. I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies have other priorities than being effective, so the…

Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time.

I love these commitments. When my Scrum leaders asks me why we didn’t finish what we ‘committed’ to doing these two weeks I want to strangle him (nothing personal, I do otherwise like the guy :P).

The terminology is so incredibly developer hostile.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#56

Post by mempko »

patothon wrote: post #24
mempko wrote: post #16

To think of scrum as a process is wrong. It's actually an organizational pattern language. The idea is that social interactions are a complex system and there are patterns of interactions which, from experience, seem to work in certain contexts. http://www.scrumabok.org/ It's not even software specific. Which is actually a strength. Example, one common misconception is the daily standup is a status meeting. In fact y…

No. Agile is a subset of TPS (toyota production system)/Lean applied to software.

And scrum? TPS is explicitly an influence on scrum.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#57

Post by distantaidenn »

thrower123 wrote: post #8
icelancer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Daily standup I have never worked at a company where this actually goes right and could not be replaced by [insert ticketing system here]. We use Basecamp to do daily check-ins on a very high priority issue, if we have one, which we usually don't.

Managers are the only people that like daily standups, so far as I can tell. I've never figured out why you couldn't just do it over slack or equivalent. It's massively inefficient to get everyone to meet up in the morning.

My current place does it on slack and has a standup. Oh, and everything is also logged in jira tickets. Makes little sense, in my opinion.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#58

Post by Aeolun »

barrkel wrote: post #31
brightball wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time.

Scrum is iterated waterfall. By iterating faster, inaccurate estimation is shown up sooner. On the other hand, developers are treated like cogs in a feature factory, munching through backlog items fed to them by product managers. I think it works well enough, for a few years. I don't think it's sustainable - the blinkers of "sprints" encourage growth of tech debt because nobody has an eye on the future and Product wo…

Scrum is unsuited to actually building a decent framework for you application.

We tend towards 4 or 5 sprints in which nothing is completed, only to suddenly have a flood of completed things the next.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#59

Post by hestefisk »

“To me it seems that one very important part of high quality software development is to maintain a simple priority queue of tasks. The weight is a combination of the value a task provides for the customer / developers and the estimated effort to implement this task.”

A.k.a. common sense :)

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#60

Post by tmin »

In my current team, we post our daily status on a slack channel: what we do yesterday and we are going to do today. We try to keep to one or two points. We have remote people so that works out well. Standup is optional. On Monday meetings, each person tell one thing that we are going to do. Sometimes it is two things but the point is to focus.
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