Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 120 posts

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#21

Post by hinkley »

ergocoder wrote: post #19

I don't think that is what a death march means. A death march is a dead-end project where everyone thinks it likely fails, but nobody says anything. Everyone is still marching. This often happens with a migration-like project. Sprint is just a project management style which is appropriate when a lot of things are uncertain (e.g. user need, budget).

A death march is walking until you fall over dead.

In code terms it’s busting your ass and hurting your health to try to push out a release - which may or may not connect with users.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#22

Post by khazhoux »

What a bogus claim. No piece of working software of any merit was ever written before Agile!

... um, I joke, but this is the attitude I see from every proponent of agile. "How can a team possibly deliver a product on time without sprints and ceremonies"? I've seen serious discussions about whether to use "Kanban" or "Scrum." They're completely different, you see: one has 4 columns for your open/to-do/in-progress/complete tasks, whereas the other has a list view for your open/to-do/in-progress/complete tasks!

"Agile" has bugged the hell out of me the last 13 years, and one of the main reasons is that the people who push for this the loudest, have never deployed a line of code in their lives: Project Managers and their ilk. Their livelihood depends on owning a process and reporting the state transitions of the actual engineering work.

I'm forced to have 2-week sprints at my company, and I just realized today that the Sprint Planning calendar entry --which I own for my team-- had expired a couple of weeks ago. Of course, no one on the team noticed because we're actually heads down merging code. But I'm sure the PMs will freak out.

Now, all that said, I do support teams meeting every 2 weeks to review tasks and priorities. That's fine. But do we have to pretend that's "Agile"?

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#23

Post by SkyPuncher »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #7

Major software projects can't be built in 2-4 weeks. They're still inherently iterative though, so keeping iterations relatively small is valuable.

Most major projects can have an iteration delivered in 2 to 4 weeks. It might be a trivial component of the entire system, but it's still progress.

I'm on a multi-month project. Our first sprint's goal is:

* Get the repos in place.

* Get a dummy endpoint running and deployed

* Derisk some things on the FE

It's not much different than building, say a house. You can demonstrate progress in small pieces. Foundation poured, framing up, roof on, sheathing on, etc, etc.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#24

Post by psunavy03 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #7

Major software projects can't be built in 2-4 weeks. They're still inherently iterative though, so keeping iterations relatively small is valuable.

No one is expecting you to build the entire thing in 2-4 weeks (1-4 weeks to be accurate if we're talking Scrum). The intent is to have a potentially shippable increment at the end of 1-4 weeks which you can demo to a customer (or someone who can credibly speak for them) and get feedback.

The idea is that when you combine software, markets, and people's opinions, you're now in a complex adaptive system, where you acting within the system changes the system, and where you can never know enough about it to make long-term plans any more than you can forecast what the weather will be on management's "due date." So you use fast feedback loops to learn as you go and build the right thing as it's needed now, not two years ago.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#25

Post by psunavy03 »

JimDabell wrote: post #13

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts. Sprints are just a way of breaking up work into discrete periods of time. There’s nothing about them that implies “drama, broken marriages, or broken families”. If you don’t finish the work you had planned to during a sprint then you fail the sprint, talk about why during the retro, then do a better job of all…

And this is why many agilists prefer to use the term "iteration," because "sprint" can be conveniently "misinterpreted" by toxic managers.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#26

Post by usefulcat »

khazhoux wrote: post #22

What a bogus claim. No piece of working software of any merit was ever written before Agile! ... um, I joke, but this is the attitude I see from every proponent of agile. "How can a team possibly deliver a product on time without sprints and ceremonies"? I've seen serious discussions about whether to use "Kanban" or "Scrum." They're completely different, you see: one has 4 columns for your open/to-do/in-progress/comp…

If you read TFA, it's abundantly clear that the author is talking about death marches (they even use that word), not the agile meaning of 'sprint'.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#27

Post by psunavy03 »

khazhoux wrote: post #22

What a bogus claim. No piece of working software of any merit was ever written before Agile! ... um, I joke, but this is the attitude I see from every proponent of agile. "How can a team possibly deliver a product on time without sprints and ceremonies"? I've seen serious discussions about whether to use "Kanban" or "Scrum." They're completely different, you see: one has 4 columns for your open/to-do/in-progress/comp…

"Every" is a pretty big word, and it's a pretty immature attitude to write off whole groups of people.

You also don't seem to have much understanding of any of the key concepts of Scrum, Agile, or Kanban beyond "merging code is all that matters!" News flash: you "merge code" for a business who has business requirements and customers, and if you ship the wrong stuff, all you've accomplished is lighting lots of money on fire and wasting your professional life.

It's a common attitude among immature devs who can't get beyond the whole "I have the most important job in the company" mindset. I'd expect it out of a junior dev, but someone who has 13 years of experience? That's not the flex you think it is.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#29

Post by audiodude »

JimDabell wrote: post #13

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts. Sprints are just a way of breaking up work into discrete periods of time. There’s nothing about them that implies “drama, broken marriages, or broken families”. If you don’t finish the work you had planned to during a sprint then you fail the sprint, talk about why during the retro, then do a better job of all…

At every former company, where we tried to use Agile or sprints, we ended up reaching a system where we just had basically "one big rolling sprint". Every two weeks, only a few tasks were actually done, and every task got pulled into the next "sprint".

Combine this with the fact that we weren't delivering any artifacts at the end of the sprint, so we didn't have any feedback from stakeholders and weren't really iterating either.

Re: Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

#30

Post by usefulcat »

ergocoder wrote: post #19

I don't think that is what a death march means. A death march is a dead-end project where everyone thinks it likely fails, but nobody says anything. Everyone is still marching. This often happens with a migration-like project. Sprint is just a project management style which is appropriate when a lot of things are uncertain (e.g. user need, budget).

Disagree. I once worked at a place where 'death march' was an entirely appropriate description of a significant portion of the normal annual development cycle of a very successful product.

Of course they didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was nonetheless.

Post reply on HN