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Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

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

#91

Post by Cthulhu_ »

demondemidi wrote: post #6
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…

I dislike sprints but have not seen a better alternative for teams of 50+ people.

That isn't a team, that's a department; I presume those people are either explicitly or implicitly divided into smaller teams / responsibilities?

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

#92

Post by lloydatkinson »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #79
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…

That sounds like a lack of discipline and retrospection. This is also the problem I have with scrum; people don't stick to the process, and cite how the agile manifesto says that the process isn't important. But this is a misconception. Stick to the process (religiously) at first, then assess how it works. In this case: you did not meet your sprint goals, which either meant you overcommitted (meaning the next sprint…

How typical to blame it on the devs instead of leadership.

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

#93

Post by jraph »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
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…

Counterpoint: The other reason for scrum style sprints is predictability. You can set deadlines like "feature X needs to be done by August", but that leads to overworking, cutting corners, etc. You can instead set the scope / features - like you said, a browser has a long list of features that need to be built - apply a score / weight to them (story points), work in iterations, see how much of that relative score is…

I see an argument for estimating tasks here, not for sprints.

You can track progress on these tasks without sprint. Of course, this tracking needs to happen regularly and sprints is a possible implementation of this but you can do it without them.

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

#94

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

Counterpoint, the people that strongly oppose agile practices the loudest have never managed a software project in their lives.

In your case, you've CHOSEN to ignore the scrum practices in favor of nose-to-the-grindstone death march. If your company says "we do scrum", that gives you and your team ammunition to say "no". Or in other words, poor planning on management's side does not constitute an emergency on yours.

Scrum practices, if done right, offer predictability. Management loves predictability. You should love predictability as well because it means you won't have to do overtime / stress.

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

#95

Post by Cthulhu_ »

fzeindl wrote: post #39

It seems that the main and only problem "solved" by SCRUM is the awkward situation where a freelance-team or solo developer happily present the result of their (web-, ux-, app-)implementation that took them half a year, the customer realizes they wanted something else and both are angry at each other. So now SCRUM has a feedback cycle that prevents that from happening. It makes sense for UX and interaction-heavy part…

It makes sense for back-end too though, especially in the context of a larger organization.

Teams A, B and C need features X, Y and Z from the back-end team. Back-end team says they will cost 3, 5 and 8 story points respectively. Back-end team's product owner talks to the teams to ask about priority. Z is planned for next sprint, X and Y for the one after. Teams A, B and C plan their work that depends on those features accordingly.

Everybody happy. We work with SAFe where that process of inter-team dependencies are formalized in quarterly "sprints" subdivided into 3-4 3-week team sprints. That's easy enough to explain at least, it's a shame the website makes it look so bad: https://scaledagileframework.com/

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

#96

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Spiwux wrote: post #54

Reading the comments to this submission made painfully clear that a significant portion of HN commenters are posting their opinions without even reading the linked article first.

This is the internet in a nutshell, and why crafting headlines and titles is an art, frequently used in "propaganda" to sway public opinion.

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

#97

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tgma wrote: post #31

Moral of the story: start with someone else's open source project.

Isn't that pretty much every software project these days? Be it language, libraries, frameworks, etc. It often feels like a lot of software development is duct taping different libraries together.

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

#98

Post by siva7 »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #92
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a lack of discipline and retrospection. This is also the problem I have with scrum; people don't stick to the process, and cite how the agile manifesto says that the process isn't important. But this is a misconception. Stick to the process (religiously) at first, then assess how it works. In this case: you did not meet your sprint goals, which either meant you overcommitted (meaning the next sprint…

How typical to blame it on the devs instead of leadership.

I don't see where parent puts blame but let's not act like all devs are angels

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

#99

Post by Cthulhu_ »

khazhoux wrote: post #33
SkyPuncher wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pour…

Those sound exactly like the things any team would do on a new project, regardless of calling it Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or whatever. I just don't see any difference between this and just having the philosophy: "Do first things first; do the next most important things next; don't bite off giant chunks but instead break them up."

It's that a lot of people don't have (didn't have?) this philosophy. My previous employer worked in telecom; it wasn't uncommon to have one major feature be under development by one or two guys for eight months at a time.

It was specialist work, sure, and the guys knew what they were doing (20-40 years in the business) but then integrating and releasing it was a big job.

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