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How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

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Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#61

Post by lbriner »

I don't quite understand the "lack of Scrum in large companies" when they all seem to Plan-Ship-Build. That is pretty much the high level description of Scrum isn't it?

Sure Scrum has some ceremonies, but these are basically planning and retrospective for improvements, so again, not really any different.

At the end of the day, most of the ways I have worked end up with Tickets/PBIs/Stories and you work through them. The only major difference is how much in-advance these are specified and to what detail.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#62

Post by mannykannot »

raverbashing wrote: post #46
lordnacho wrote: post #17

The thing about Scrum is the observations and principles make sense, but then to sell it as a course they've turned it into very specific prescriptions. I went on a scrum course and the takeaway was basically that feedback is a big deal, and you should try to get some repeatedly and quickly. It's also common sense that you should have tasks written down somewhere, and that some of them are more important than others.…

I suspect the prescriptivism and detail have one end goal and that is for someone that has no idea how software is done to follow the procedures. It also turns the process into an "almost predictable process" for the higher-ups to see turned into a graph in some ppt. You also have to deal with people who needs to be told which shoe to put in first before they think the process is "confusing". Same reason for PMP, it'…

More cynically, this is the path to selling consulting and training services.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#63

Post by vthallam »

One of the bests parts about working at a faang is we don't do scrum or stand ups. Everyone shares timelines ahead of a project, and they run with the execution, flag if there are any blockers or need help. Saves so much time without the extra overhead.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#64

Post by dtech »

deepGem wrote: post #38
sparsely wrote: post #15

> Many teams work on main branches, get quick feedback from CI/CD systems and can immediately share functionality which they are working on with other team members. I occasionally see statements like this floating around - does he mean: * Devs make their changes locally, commit and push directly to main, and then the CI/CD either notifies them that tests failed or deploys to prod or * Devs make their changes locally,…

I worked on a Tensorflow feature in 2018. There was no branching involved. Fork the main repo, build the feature on your child repo, make sure all unit tests pass and then send a pull request to the main/master of the parent repo. Typically someone reviews the code, you incorporate code review comments, pass all unit tests, CI-CD pass, PR approved. That's it. Your code is in the next production cycle. So yes, you wor…

This is just branching, except your branch is in a different repo. You just call the branch downstream/master and your local master, instead of the more common origin/yourbranch and your local yourbranch.

For the rest the merging issues are identical. You can still have a merge conflict between downstream/master and origin/master if someone merged something conflicting into origin/master since the fork happened.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#65

Post by specialist »

Really good, thoughtful, constructive update to Alistair Cockburn's thesis.

Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development [1999]

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1811226.1811241

Found TLDR:

http://www.csci.csusb.edu/dick/biba.php?search=Cockburn00

Sorry, Cockburn's OG website is apparently gone. And I can't quickly find a naked link to this paper.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#67

Post by aitchnyu »

danjac wrote: post #7

My tinfoil hat theory is that Scrum was invented by Big Tech to hobble potential future competitors.

> ...Skype in 2012, the company had gone all-in on Scrum. All engineers and product people were sent to best-in-class Scrum training, facilitated by one of the Agile manifesto’s founders.

We trade the story of one Agile Founder wanting to kill his monster baby, but the others have been making bank.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#68

Post by elzbardico »

brightball wrote: post #12

Everything described in there is mirrored in SAFe fwiw, even though their survey said it was mostly used in large non-tech companies. Individual teams can use whatever they want to manage themselves (Kanban, Lean, Scrum, etc…up to the team). Estimations planning and commitments for each quarter are done by developers exclusively, including coordinating across teams. Releases can happen at any point. A strong and cont…

> I really wish more people knew about SAFe.

Yeah, I feel the same about nicotine, lead, mercury, dioxin and asbestos.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#69

Post by snarf21 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #6

At Shopify, we tend to do whatever our engineers want in this regard. My team meets weekly and looks at a kanban project board. If we need to adjust, we have retros, etc and change the process. We have the autonomy. In a past life you would be told Agile meant “self organizing teams”. But in practice that was only allowed in a narrow definition of change under the prescribed process being foisted on teams from above.…

One thing I learned a long time ago is that a "bad" process that is followed universally by everyone (dev, pjm, pm) will always out perform a "great" process with only token buy-in and constant exceptions.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#70

Post by UK-Al05 »

sparsely wrote: post #55
whynotmaybe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe have a look at this https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

This seems to be advocating the second workflow, i.e. pushing on a short lived branch then merging back in (their intermediate setup seems impractical technically for most setups - how do you run standard tests without committing your code, unless you do everything locally?)

You answered the question. You run as many tests as you can locally. Sometimes you can't, and the build goes red and you fix it with another commit.
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