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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#41

Post by ggm »

Scrum puts "feel good" limits around the unknown qualities of time-to-complete and "divide and conquer"

You still don't really know when it will be ready, but you now have talking points with management about a) whats been done and b) how complex it is. This builds belief: Belief there will be a solution, and Belief you can find it.

Nothing not said better by others here, but I say this as a party who was dragged kicking and screaming into the process to be an agile product manager, hated it, and got out. I totally "get" why people want this. It's very rare to be a Bell Labs, or Xerox Parc, and have pretty much complete freedom to spend budget and deliver an outcome when it's ready.

I also have worked on large s/w projects which cost $16m to fail to work, and $60m in lawsuits out the other side. I know that the alternative (a massive proscriptive playbook of minute details of functions, UML, flowcharts, you-name-it) exists and works, or not (depending on your point of view).

Really? I think scrum was the wrong name. The process itself, is fine. Talking to your co-workers builds a sense of purpose and direction.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#42

Post by dancemethis »

Then the individual goes on the dumber-than-life anti-communist rant. I love how he tries to create a bunker with "if you disagree you're into Scrum".

I dislike Scrum quite a bit, but oh gee ain't that a full plate for Scrum apologists to have a point.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#43

Post by gedy »

I agree it's rarely "done right", but I've been in career long enough that waterfall was still common early in career and horrible crunch time targeting some date at end of 9-12 months projects was inevitable - Scrum was a total breath of fresh air back in 2005-2006 and saved my sanity.

Basically we'd ask mgmt "what do you want next?" and they had to fuck off for the next 4 weeks while devs, ux, QA worked with no changes in plans until next demo and release. They were responsible for figuring out "when will everything be done?" etc.

I recently left a startup that said they were "doing Scrum" and it was just daily task tracking and pushing devs to overcommit to each sprint - that's not what I consider Scrum.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#44

Post by foogazi »

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 team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints

This is not part of scrum

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#45

Post by psunavy03 »

ipaddr wrote: post #24
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?

And there's the typical internet argument!

"I disagree with you and here's why!"

"I'm sorry that you're personally offended. See, you disagreed with my pure, sweet, logical opinion, which means you must be personally offended, because no REASONABLE person would disagree with me. And because you're offended, you operate on emotions, as opposed to my high-and-mighty self, who operates on pure, sweet logic. Thus I am right and you're a crybaby, because you dared to disagree with what I consider to be my pure, sweet logic."

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#46

Post by mwint »

I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams.

I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process.

Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: taking developers who can’t or don’t want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them.

Most of us here are not in that category. I’d wager a majority of HN readers can’t help but to seek out understanding of the business, where this piece fits, what it interacts with. For us, specifying everything upfront is useless. Estimating stuff is irritating because we need the flexibility to make smart decisions during dev. Retro meetings are lies because we can’t say “stop with all this and let me work”.

But if you’re trying to make a process than can take junior devs (not junior in tenure, but junior in the qualities above) and produce an output that scales almost-kinda linearly with dev count, it sort of works.

I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them.

But I can also see how a company ends up there - go through a tough hiring year, or even just make a few poor hiring decisions, and now you have people on the team who need handholding and supervision. That’s what scrum is; it feels like micromanagement because it is. It forces junior-performing devs into a productive state - maybe 5% of what you’d get out of a senior-performing dev without scrum, but it’s something non-negative.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#48

Post by j45 »

cpeterso wrote: post #23
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.

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...

Thanks so much for the link.

My own experience has been similar.

Start with keeping a very flexible core and codebase.. feed it with launched code from a plan that balances bug fixes, progress forward, and customer needs from the business.

This meant having a backlog, and by scoring each item on criticality where 1 was critical and 6 was someday/maybe, and whether it was internal facing, or external facing (customer is aware), you could almost start selecting what was done and ready.

Would love to hear anyone's processes they used that have worked well for them from start to growth.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#49

Post by foogazi »

> Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control.

Bad managers would certainly like to do this but this is not what scrum is about

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#50

Post by computerdork »

daliusd wrote: post #30
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

agreed, Agile and Scrum are not the same, and if you read person's followup comments, even he says "he believes in Agile" but hates Scrum.

Yeah, most aspects of Agile (iterative development, MVP...) are fantastic and it has made most types of engineering lighter, more team-focused and well more agile.

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