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

61–70 of 120 posts

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

#61

Post by janosdebugs »

jraph wrote: post #2

edit: whoops, it seems the author uses "sprint" to say something else than the agile stuff [1]. So this comment is a bit out of topic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142781 --- I strongly dislike sprints, but I would be open to discussion about them in a client project. For something like Chrome which isn't driven by client needs that are difficult to understand, whose roadmap constantly needs to be adjus…

If you have a technical client, they will understand. If you don't, nothing in the world will make them understand. Ship a build too early and they will start complaining about superficial things that are on your todo list. Plus, nothing prevents you from shipping regular builds to the client without sprints either. It's often a good idea to set up nightly builds and make sure they are never broken. As you said, your PM or whatever you call them can still have calls with them, but there is no point in wasting the time of however many engineers work on it to regularly attend those calls.

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

#62

Post by d3vmax »

You must understand that twitter is rewarding views/conversation to 'creators' via subscription. You must have noticed an uptick of blue tick accounts who drivel lame information but packed to stroke a conversation. This way they get payouts from twitter creator program due to engagement and impressions.

The blue tick also puts them on top of conversations; this is now used by Russians to create divisions in democracies with paid and useful idiot(s) accounts. For Elon, who is living in a selfish bubble, that is free speech and he keeps reposting conspiracy theorist.

In short, the whole platform is going to the gutter. Being a champion of the Internet from the late 90's, I can't believe where we are at now and how non-scientific fervor has grabbed every aspect of discourse (anti vax, flat earth, soros/gates, Q/Pizza/MAGA, etc).

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

#63

Post by JimDabell »

d3vmax wrote: post #62

You must understand that twitter is rewarding views/conversation to 'creators' via subscription. You must have noticed an uptick of blue tick accounts who drivel lame information but packed to stroke a conversation. This way they get payouts from twitter creator program due to engagement and impressions. The blue tick also puts them on top of conversations; this is now used by Russians to create divisions in democrac…

This Twitter thread is two years old, posted long before Twitter’s current woes.

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

#64

Post by modeless »

d3vmax wrote: post #62

You must understand that twitter is rewarding views/conversation to 'creators' via subscription. You must have noticed an uptick of blue tick accounts who drivel lame information but packed to stroke a conversation. This way they get payouts from twitter creator program due to engagement and impressions. The blue tick also puts them on top of conversations; this is now used by Russians to create divisions in democrac…

What relevance does this have to a tweet from 2021?

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

#65

Post by zerbinxx »

lionkor wrote: post #53
antisthenes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 allocating work in the next sprint. You don't even "fail" the sprint, that's a bad attitude. You just consider work spilled over and take on less work + spillover work next sprint. There's only cause for concern if you repeatedly have spillovers every sprint - that's usu…

Or you might have spillover because the team is very new and hasnt quite agreed on the value of a story point yet

There are a lot of reasons for spillover in my experience. They’re all interrelated.

First and foremost is that most product/project managers, engineering managers, “scrum masters”, etc. do not truly love doing the work of backlog refinement, ticket management, writing acceptance criteria, or other forms of planning that entail actionable results. They may love the glory of leading or assisting a team of software engineers to build great products, but I’ve seen maybe 1 or 2 who are actually qualified to be the agile/process guy/gal. Additionally, they’re frequently counter-incentivized to be meeting jockeys, PowerPoint creators, and “culture people” who simply do not do the job as it’s meant to be done.

As soon as ^^ happens, sprints are destined to fail, because the work of sizing tickets falls squarely onto engineers who would probably rather be writing code than talking about it, so they make informal agreements about value of a story point being a day’s work or not blocking tickets that don’t have defined success criteria, or what have you. As such, tickets are not properly vetted and grow to be massive, amorphous chunks of work that either allow devs to hide from the (painful/annoying) process of Scrum and just do their thing.

The last (and worst) of the reasons spillover happens is that people are burnt out, unmotivated, or unrewarded by the process. If the “customer” (also a massive rats nest of a concept in Agile) isn’t at the demo and actively interested in the product being developed, any amount of “points” will feel arbitrary and useless. There’s no faster way to lose interest in Scrum than canceling a demo and having your developers lose faith that completing that ticket actually matters to someone.

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

#66

Post by abwizz »

d3vmax wrote: post #62

You must understand that twitter is rewarding views/conversation to 'creators' via subscription. You must have noticed an uptick of blue tick accounts who drivel lame information but packed to stroke a conversation. This way they get payouts from twitter creator program due to engagement and impressions. The blue tick also puts them on top of conversations; this is now used by Russians to create divisions in democrac…

we are experimenting with ways to have an inclusive global conversation.

there will be many more failures

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

#68

Post by kanzenryu2 »

jjav wrote: post #58
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…

> They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts. I don't think so. That's why sprints are so toxic. It's even right in the name. A 100m run is a "sprint", but nobody expects you to maintain that pace for a marathon. Much less for a multi-decade career. But in software you're expected to be in a sprinting pace all life long. And even increasing your "veloci…

The name sprint comes from rugby, and just refers to what the team would be doing together to succeed (sprinting to the other end of the field with the ball).

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

#69

Post by tacozilla »

JimDabell wrote: post #59
zo1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also known as the No True Scotsman argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman . "You weren't doing real Agile™". The only reason I'm posting this is because we have had similar things happen in almost every attempt at using sprints. They're just not suited for any sort of formal/business context where you don't have absolute and frankly religious buy-in to the concept.

The “No true Scotsman” fallacy is when you introduce unrelated criteria to disqualify something that would ordinarily be a member of a group. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that somebody who was not born in Scotland, does not have Scottish family, does not hold any kind of British citizenship, and has never even set foot in Scotland is not, in fact, a Scotsman. That’s not a fallacy. A sprint is a discrete per…

The purpose of language is to communicate, and audiodude did that quite effectively given the fact I chuckled when I read their comment, because I knew exactly what they meant. A "rolling sprint" might be an oxymoron, but it certainly isn't conceptually void. It quite literally does have meaning considering I and many others clearly understood the point he was making through his personal anecdote.

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

#70

Post by jimbob45 »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #42
audiodude wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 itera…

Sounds like you would've been better off with kanban. Did you ever consider switching?

In my experience, the people choosing between Scrum and Kansan are not the ones participating in the Scrum/Kanban. Modern leadership attempts to take away as much agency as possible and wonders why everyone hates them.
Post reply on HN