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

Scrum is a cancer

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 486 posts

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#61

Post by intelVISA »

jdougan wrote: post #56
tuckerconnelly wrote: post #14

From Peopleware: “In the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study [from the University of New South Wales]…they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others…Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (‘Just wake me up when you’re done.’) had the highest productivity of all.” I read 20+ books on management and leader…

While I too despise Scrum, the causation could be runming the other way: the Bosses that have a better team could be more likely to let them run without major pressure.

No love for Scrum but this is the more likely explanation.

A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value.

Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#62

Post by Camisa »

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…

Great time to tackle some tech debt

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#63

Post by anticristi »

Agile is a cancer too: In many orgs, Agile is essentially synonymous with chaos. Zero look-ahead. Let's do it first and fix it later. Later never comes.

I believe 99% of Agile's value comes from caring about developers and letting them pride themselves with their progress.

Managers benefit from regularly reminding devs that their progress is not measured by amount of code, but working features. "Can you do a demo?"

Care about your devs, let them demonstrate progress. There, I just invented another Agile framework.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#65

Post by xyzelement »

mwint wrote: post #46

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…

I agree with this. In my experience: these "rituals" are a way to force the conversations that a "senior" - in your terminology - dev would naturally have.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#66

Post by throwuxiytayq »

psunavy03 wrote: post #45
ipaddr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

Do you even code?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#67

Post by beardedwizard »

I would have guessed more HN readers would attempt to understand the desired outcomes, how the implementation attempts to achieve them, then take the good from the bad as a source of constant improvement.

The tone on this thread has that jaded and defeatest "management sucks" attitude that I find most often in the least productive engineers regardless of how they work.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#68

Post by intelVISA »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #26
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.

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 s…

Nice, though part of me wonders: if using version control why bother reading off yesterday's commits? Rest is pretty good and accurate imo.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#69

Post by beardedwizard »

mwint wrote: post #46

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…

I really appreciate this take and the sibling comment. Exactly. See what good is there, move on about the rest.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#70

Post by hliyan »

computerdork wrote: post #57

I hope people read this person's full post. he says, "I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile." Yeah, agile and scrum aren't the same. In my humble opinion, agile process is pretty fantastic and a lot better than waterfall (although waterfall has some elements that should be carried over to agile) or even Rational Unified Process. Yeah, Agile is taking over the engineering world (not just software) for a reason, bec…

I once blew a team's mind by this simple demonstration:

1) Searched the entire agile manifesto site for "sprints", "stories", "velocity", "stand ups" etc. Zero references.

2) Searched the official scrum guide for the words "agile", "stories", "story points". Zero references. It only defined sprints.

Post reply on HN