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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

#431

Post by Clubber »

vikingerik wrote: post #429
knightofmars wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I've experienced the exact opposite. The company I work with had been doing waterfall development for 15+ years. We switched to agile using the Scrum framework. It wasn't smooth sailing the entire way, there were teams early on that struggled with adopting Scrum. Most often it was due to the team attempting to solve every retro issue by updating "the process", which only addressed symptoms instead of fix…

I had the same experience, in a longtime waterfall company, that adopted Scrum, with significant pain points but it was still a world of improvement. The thing that the Scrum haters don't see is that its biggest benefit is invisible -- it's in what doesn't happen, in what Scrum avoids . Scrum avoids the eighteen-month waterfall death marches that kill a department or a company. Scrum gets you thinking in terms of man…

The problem with scrum discussion is it's always compared to waterfall, particularly unyielding waterfall. Even construction planning, which is where waterfall came from, of has slips and adjustments. There were other methodologies other than waterfall before agile or scrum arrived. I went to college in the mid 90s and they taught that waterfall existed but a more iterative approach was actually used in practice. If you were doing immutable waterfall, anything would have been better, maybe including nothing at all.

Having said that, I'm glad Scrum worked for you.

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

#432

Post by yupper32 »

kragen wrote: post #402
yupper32 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abrupt new feature with an urgent deadline As someone who has spent most of their 7 year career at big companies that follow "plan build ship" cycles, I don't understand this post. What abrupt new feature with urgent deadlines? Why can't this hypothetical feature wait? Sure, for Coronavirus teams spun up and other work stopped, but that's a pretty big outlier. Most features are planned a quarter or so ahead. > Do y…

What might an "urgent new feature" consist of? Well... The Swiss Franc is no longer pegged to the Euro, so our trading software needs to track a separate currency, and also we need to stop trading EUR/CHF forex pairs as if they were still pegged; we lost $2 million before I turned the system off this morning. The new version of IOS doesn't support the old SNMP MIB, and our customer has already installed it. The vid.m…

I have no idea what project you work on, but that sounds like 30 different teams each experiencing:

1. Rare actual urgent issues

2. Shit leadership adding last minute requirements (that no scrum or waterfall or agile whatever would help with)

3. A bunch of config changes (I worked on payments systems in the past. We had some contractors who would basically mess with config files all day as countries changed laws, etc).

4. Stuff that only quant firms care about

Regardless, you didn't address the second part of my comment: What does the fact that we'd have to stop other work have to do with anything? That'd be the case for any workflow structure.

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

#433

Post by shagie »

bengale wrote: post #257
shagie wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clear implementation of the Thermocline of Truth - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...

Yeah that all sounds very familiar.

As an aside, his other posts of the Dead Sea effect - http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

And Anatomy of a runaway IT project https://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it...

Those are fun reads too.

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

#434

Post by justincredible »

robertlagrant wrote: post #256
hnuser847 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former engineer who used to deal with the bone-crushing tedium of fundamentalist Scrum, I have enough empathy for my team to not force this crap on them. I keep the process light, communicate a lot, and treat them like adults.

> I keep the process light, communicate a lot, and treat them like adults. That sounds like fundamentalist Scrum.

I think he means fundamentalist Scrum analogously to fundamentalist Christianity (and other religions), which is connoted by rigidity in ritual and intolerance to deviant thinking.

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

#435

Post by kragen »

yupper32 wrote: post #432
kragen wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What might an "urgent new feature" consist of? Well... The Swiss Franc is no longer pegged to the Euro, so our trading software needs to track a separate currency, and also we need to stop trading EUR/CHF forex pairs as if they were still pegged; we lost $2 million before I turned the system off this morning. The new version of IOS doesn't support the old SNMP MIB, and our customer has already installed it. The vid.m…

I have no idea what project you work on, but that sounds like 30 different teams each experiencing: 1. Rare actual urgent issues 2. Shit leadership adding last minute requirements (that no scrum or waterfall or agile whatever would help with) 3. A bunch of config changes (I worked on payments systems in the past. We had some contractors who would basically mess with config files all day as countries changed laws, etc…

I've worked on different projects. Yeah, I agree about stopping other work.

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

#436

Post by pempem »

Jensson wrote: post #202
pempem wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the kind of religious adherence which can make the process feels a bit like..a staged show? Stifling instead of open discussion? "Metrics" though drive when something might be delivered which triggers marketing spend, hiring requirements and so on. It says "we're working on this now and that next" which drives all kinds of internal storytelling about priorities and cascades down (or up?) into quarterly call…

You set up long term team based goals (OKR's, Objectives and Key Results) and then evaluate how well those goals were achieved. It isn't 100% accurate or fair, but neither are Scrum burndown charts.

And how would you ship product against an OKR and manage spend for the marketing to support the launch?

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

#437

Post by robertlagrant »

_6pvr wrote: post #299
robertlagrant wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole process revolves around the assumption that there's lack of trust and team cohesion Where in Scrum is this defined?

A mandatory meeting in which all developers must be present and regurgitate status updates to the entire team, as an example, assumes this information wouldn't get to relevant parties organically and all team members must consume all status updates.

Scrum doesn't have a status update meeting.

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

#438

Post by mempko »

wittycardio wrote: post #272
mempko wrote: post #132

Alternative title: "Big Tech's Curious Absence of Innovation". Am I the only one who thinks Big Tech is slow at shipping?

Yes you are because they ship an insane quantity of products with very high quality. I'm guessing you're looking to justify the existence of scrum?

I just think Big Tech not using scrum is a strange way to make an argument against scrum since there are sectors in tech that ship faster imo. So why not look at the fastest shipping segments and see what they use.

I would love to hear from Big Tech employees if they feel like they ship a lot. To give a baseline, 1k LOC per developer per week is a lot. That's what the highest performing teams can produce.

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

#439

Post by wittycardio »

mempko wrote: post #438
wittycardio wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are because they ship an insane quantity of products with very high quality. I'm guessing you're looking to justify the existence of scrum?

I just think Big Tech not using scrum is a strange way to make an argument against scrum since there are sectors in tech that ship faster imo. So why not look at the fastest shipping segments and see what they use. I would love to hear from Big Tech employees if they feel like they ship a lot. To give a baseline, 1k LOC per developer per week is a lot. That's what the highest performing teams can produce.

Are you trolling or stuck in the 60s? Do you seriously consider lines of code to be a real measure of productivity

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

#440

Post by robertlagrant »

osigurdson wrote: post #344
robertlagrant wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the case. A two week sprint should have about 100 minutes of standup, 1 hour of planning, 1 hour of refinement, half an hour of review and 1 hour retro, ish (I can't remember the exact timings). About 5 hours every 2 weeks. Saying that adds up to a full 2 weeks of work is just... pointless. So falsifiable.

I can only speak from personal experience (perhaps our Scrum consultant did it wrong). We have a large group and even running through the all of the demos (mostly slides really) from all of the teams at the end of a three week period took days. Added to this the retrospective, multiple planning sessions as well as all of the meetings that we used to have prior to doing this. In the end, it was just so obviously unwor…

I agree with all of that. To me Scrum is a reasonably minimal set of meetings that involve everyone who needs to be involved as little as possible to get the job done, but that won't be everyone's experience. Partly because Scrum is a methodology with a pretty specific use case; it's definitely not for everything.
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