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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#21

Post by idlewords »

psunavy03 wrote: post #6

Typical immature bullshit where someone describes their own company's screwed-up incompetent so-called "Scrum" and "Agile" implementation, and then claims that that's universalizable amongst all companies everywhere. Just because a so-called "Scrum Master" not worth the title is forcing you to do BS things that inhibit your flow does not mean it's emblematic of the species. I mean, how would you feel if someone gener…

This is a No True Scotsman argument. The guy enumerated a list of ways scrum failed in his experience; it's always interesting to hear honestly about failure modes from people who have actually used something a lot in their work.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#23

Post by cpeterso »

j45 wrote: post #4
billy_bitchtits wrote: post #3

My company bought into the SAFe bullsh*t and it’s awful.

Is there an alternative anyone would recommend. It might not be the best question to ask given the complexity of the software and experience/culture of the team.

There is no best approach, but this article highlights some common aspects from a survey of 100+ tech companies’ approaches to project management:

“How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum”

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big...

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#24

Post by ipaddr »

psunavy03 wrote: post #6

Typical immature bullshit where someone describes their own company's screwed-up incompetent so-called "Scrum" and "Agile" implementation, and then claims that that's universalizable amongst all companies everywhere. Just because a so-called "Scrum Master" not worth the title is forcing you to do BS things that inhibit your flow does not mean it's emblematic of the species. I mean, how would you feel if someone gener…

Are you a scrum master and feel personally slighted that the popularity is slipping?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#25

Post by knodi123 »

zug_zug wrote: post #13

Interesting phenomenon happens at my place which is scrum + Safe. Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints, so if we finish our work with 2 days left the manager asks not to start anything new. The process is a performance within a performance, literally getting told NOT to do more work. This is what happens when you have chart-oriented-development (particularly jira's toxic charts). Y…

Our solution for this is to have nebulous time sucks that need to be done, but don't have a ticket with an estimate. Like "increase test coverage" or "experiment with new things for a git hook to do" or "eliminate warnings". There's no deadline, and everything else is higher priority- but when you finish your sprint early, now you know what you can work on. And it's useful, not just scutwork.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#26

Post by bonestamp2 »

j45 wrote: post #4
billy_bitchtits wrote: post #3

My company bought into the SAFe bullsh*t and it’s awful.

Is there an alternative anyone would recommend. It might not be the best question to ask given the complexity of the software and experience/culture of the team.

We do a very loose agile process and everyone seems to like it. Basically, we have a standup every morning. Each team member has up to 1 minute to list (in very brief form) what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today.

It identifies if anyone will be stepping on anyone else's toes, or if anyone knows of something similar and can point you to it, and it lets the project manager know if anyone is working on something that can be traded for a higher priority task that just came up.

Most of the time, you work on what you say you're going to work on. Sometimes, the project manager will call you after standup to get more detail and/or adjust your priority to a different task.

This standup is the only formal meeting the developers go to, other than the odd department/company wide meeting. The project manager goes to all of the other meetings.

We are the most productive team in the company. I think the autonomy and the lack of formal meetings are the real magic. We're fully remote and talk to each other plenty throughout the day in an adhoc way, sometimes for fun and sometimes for technical discussions, problem solving, brainstorming, sanity checks (technical and personal), etc.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#27

Post by semireg »

boppo1 wrote: post #11

How do I avoid this in my career?

I’m a solo consultant and have had many good client relationships based on agreeing on deliverables. To summarize according to the old “pick two” adage of delivered-fast, works-to-spec and cheap: I’m fast, reliable, and expensive. I deliver high value and I’m always available to answer questions.

Interestingly, me consulting solo at an hourly rate doesn’t scale. To solve this, about 5 years ago I started a side business of building an electron app for designing and printing labels. I feel like scaling up allows my customers to pick all 3. The app is immediately available, it works, and it’s inexpensive.

So there’s another way to avoid agile and scrum: solo entrepreneurship.

Good luck!

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#28

Post by j45 »

convolvatron wrote: post #16
j45 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an alternative anyone would recommend. It might not be the best question to ask given the complexity of the software and experience/culture of the team.

This is a very unsatisfactory answer - but you have to grow a culture. Working with people to match their personal goals with organizational goals. High degree of mutual trust. Cooperative design. Group ownership of the codebase and rotating responsibilities. Lack of 'magic knowledge'. Sufficient infrastructure development to reduce rote workload on developers. All of these are organic rather than formulaic. They req…

No, you're totally right though - culture is everything, and the experience of being a part of a team how it works is everything.

I heard an interesting explanation the other day, hard skills are easy to measure, and soft skills are hard to measure, but developing soft skills can be are more important than hard skills.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#30

Post by daliusd »

drpixie wrote: post #19

> Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control. Agile and Scrum are for managers who don't know what they want, but they'll "know it when they see it". (Or more likely, they'll declare that they wanted is what they've got when the money runs out.) Just stay away from it, if at all possible.

Putting Agile and Scrum in the same bucket is right only if you know only waterfall in your comfy corporate/government job
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