Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#91

Post by bick_nyers » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:41 PM UTC

perrygeo wrote: post #4

IMO sprints are a barely-adequate substitute for a coherent vision with priorities. In a chaotic (dysfunctional) business environment where things change on a whim, sprints serve as a firewall to provide a few days/weeks of focus. If everyone on the team is aligned and knows what the priorities are, sprints are rarely needed. When you do sprint, it's reserved for real emergencies. You don't need to play games to carv…

One advantage of agile sprints that was pitched to me when the company I worked for was converting from 6 week cycles down to 2 week cycles was the power of this firewall and priority system. Customer Support giving you a hard time on this feature? Point them to the card and say it's in the next sprint.

How I feel now about that firewall now? I'm looking for a company that has a competent technical dictatorship in command.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#92

Post by 28304283409234 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

No. There is no benefit. None.

If a team decides to split up work into certain chunks in order to get something out the door than that is up to the team in that specific time and that specific place.

This lunacy of copy/pasting whatever worked for one group in one life and applying it to another in another life baffles me.

Get humans. After they learn to trust each other and learn how the operate together you will have a unique mix. Unique. One of a kind. Have that unique entity decide how they want to deliver value.

As soon as the unique entity changes because humans leave or join, redo from start. All bets are off.

And a manager or company should focus only on how they want progress to be reported. Progress time and rapport format.

Expecting sprints when being a a manager or executive is dumb and immature.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#93

Post by JohnBooty » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #29

You might end up coincidentally liking some parts of these software design methodologies like Kanban, but they generally aren't intentionally implemented to maximize developer happiness. For me, even the name "sprint" just instantly pressures me to feel rushed in my work and I hate everything about this religion. These methodologies are designed to be a "good enough" default way for non-technical managers to organize…

    For me, even the name "sprint" just instantly 
    pressures me to feel rushed in my work and I 
    hate everything about this religion.

While I think Scrum is a small step forward relative to the chaotic nightmares I've generally experienced in this industry, I wholeheartedly agree with this criticism of the term.

"Sprint" makes zero sense as a term. By sheer definition, in the real world you cannot sprint all the time. In fact you can only sprint for a very short time. Perhaps less than 1% of your waking hours.

And yet, in agile, we are supposed to be "sprinting" all of the damn time. There is only sprinting. There is nothing else but the sprint.

Dumb and probably harmful choice of terminology.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#94

Post by wpietri » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #80

Lutger wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true to me. The way scrum works in practice is a, forgive my language, perverse inversion where the process has become the goal and the outcomes are less important. I worked with 4 weeks, 2 weeks and 1 weeks sprints, and with 'just kanban' as well. I now work with Shape-Up, where the build cycle is 4 to 6 weeks, but rather than having a backlog we just have a defined (and designed) problem solution and get…

> But a good team will invent an ad-hoc 'process' on the fly as is required to solve problems, without descending into chaos. This is the heart of agile, but rarely gets implemented, in part because the Agile advocacy was not largely directed at the people who make the decisions that make implementation possible, but at people who lack that power.

For sure. XP looked at first glance to be heavily prescriptive. But the initial set of practices were always meant as a starting point for a team. The notion was to give them a safe context in which to experiment and adapt.

That was never really compatible with large companies, where managers need to feel in control and appear actively responsible for success. It also wasn't compatible with a top-down desire for "legibility". So in practice we end up with uniform process that's a bad fit for individual breeds

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#95

Post by sys_64738 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

Agile/scrum/sprints are the garbage dumpster on product development introduced to wrestle back control from SW developers. Unfortunately, nowadays, the majority folk know nothing else than this and all the buzzwords associated with this garbage process. Those who worked with different models talk it down and make a mockery of it. Ultimately it was introduced to track webpage developers but has been adopted anywhere the word software is used. It's death can't come quick enough.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#96

Post by noodle » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #62

noodle wrote: post #16

Modern corporate Agile isn't the same as Agile Manifesto Agile. Even though they have basically the same name, don't mix the two up. Sprints are one tool in your toolbox. Use them when it makes sense to do so. I view them as most helpful around scope limiting. The goal is working software of some sort by the end of the sprint. That requires you to think about the problem at hand and how to break it apart such that yo…

> Sprints are one tool in your toolbox. Use them when it makes sense to do so. This sounds great in theory and I would totally agree (in theory), but my experience has been that it's the PMs or executives or higher managers that make the decision, regardless of what the engineers think. In fact, most of the times I've seen sprints pushed back on it ended up in bad feelings and unintended offense taken by PMs. In the…

Those types of conversations are going to depend a lot on their context.

Like, if your company is a large company that has a lot of operationalized tooling around corporate agile, one team saying "hey lets not do this" is not going to go over super well. A smaller company with fewer and/or more autonomous by culture teams will have more success.

But it will also depend on what kind of way its communicated. Can't just say "lets stop doing sprints", you have to make sure you're justifying it and/or offering alternatives that speak to the needs of the other members of your team/company.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#97

Post by sys42590 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

peteradio wrote: post #83

sys42590 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many reasons sprint goals are abused, it can be it bad management culture trickling down, people in charge not understanding even the simplest points of the Agile Manifesto, or even weird companywide KPIs linked to Scrum or Kanban completion metrics that you can so easily pull out of most agile management software (e.g. Jira).

Our scrum lord told us his bonus is tied to these metrics so you can guess why managers and scrum lords behave the way they do in spite of the manifesto. Throw the manifesto out the window its complete bullshit because they say one thing and do another.

Indeed, Scrum looks nice in theory, and can be nice in practice (from my personal experience), because in theory it is about self-organizing of teams and collaboration with the product owner.

In practice however in so many companies it is totally twisted and used as a method of control, and applying pressure, as you said by e.g. making metrics bonus relevant.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#98

Post by sys42590 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

bick_nyers wrote: post #86

sys42590 wrote: post #40

I've worked agile for quite some years now. Please repeat after me: 1. The sprint goal is not a contract. The mental and physical well being of the developers always takes precedence over the sprint goal. The sprint goal is merely a guidance. 2. Not completing all stories at the end of the sprint should not make you feel bad. A sprint is always filled using estimates which never will be correct, and are often way to…

Sounds like every team also needs a therapist to do agile correctly. Only half joking!

The issue is that agile was once (back in the days of the manifesto) a grass roots effort to make life for developers better, but in many companies it has been perverted and twisted from a framework for collaboration and self-organization to controlling and pressuring development teams in a fortnight cycle. Of course this gives Scrum a bad rep.

May an on-site therapist help more than just replacing attrition? If it would (in terms of net profits), many companies would have started to do so.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#99

Post by taylodl » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #5

Positive: The alternative to sprints is frequently no process at all, not the strawman waterfall. If you can't plan two weeks of work there is no way you can plan six months work of work. Sprints mean that conflicts get surfaced regularly and not "kicked down the can" for eight months. Teams that don't release regularly don't know how to release. so they'll plan to spend six months developing something and think they…

^^^ This here everybody!

The much bemoaned waterfall is not a development methodology, it's a project management methodology. The developers had no process at all. That's an important point missed by developers who've never known anything other than agile development. From a developer's perspective it's not agile or waterfall, it's agile or nothing at all (typically). Agile, with its warts and all, is far better than nothing at all.

Re: Ask HN: Do Agile 'Sprints' Benefit Software Developers?

#100

Post by icedchai » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

Lutger wrote: post #73

icedchai wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The urgency is often fake. You complete your sprint, only to find out you built a feature nobody needed any time soon (or maybe ever.)

This is my biggest beef with deadlines in general and sprints in particular. The urgency is fake, but the cost is not. It is not 'free' to set a random deadline. You will pay with productivity and quality and cause stress. There is no way around it, so do it for a sound reason. These days if somebody sets a deadline I always probe them to find out why. "What happens if we are a week late, a month? Is there a reason f…

I built something in one sprint, only to see it replaced with "V2" two sprints later. "V1" was never used by an actual end user. But, yeah, it worked for demos!