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Scrum is a cancer
81–90 of 486 posts
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#82So what is an alternative process?
Spoken like a true scrum master.
You don't have to produce an alternative to critique something. In fact making such a requirement makes problems linger.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#83My company bought into the SAFe bullsh*t and it’s awful.
Why would you hate spending 1 month out of 4 for “planning” and then 40% of the time in the remaining 3 months also for “planning” resulting in a massive destruction of productivity all so you can now claim that “yeah, you delivered a fraction of what the company was delivering pre SAFE, but at least we planned on delivering a fraction of what we delivered Pre-SAFE.”
Anecdote: When Intel's stock kept falling early this year they had to quit SAFE to speed up development... a bird said.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#84Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during…
> Their most aggressively marketed prescription was scrum.
I don't think Agile has prescribed this though. Scrum, in my view, is an intermediary 'solution' so non-technical 'bosses' can overlook and micromanage dev teams. I guess it all stems from 'unproductivity' really, those cases you mention, where you end up with sub-par devs trying to deliver complex software products.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#85I’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 would fully agree with your point if I weren't regularly in daily were nobody listen to what being said : e.g. discovering by themselves what was said the previous day/week as it was a new piece of important information to share.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#86I’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.
But what to do when instead of 6 competent and efficient devs you get 40 people with random mix of skills, no domain knowledge and at moderate programming talent? I dont know Scrum to comment on it, but many management methods converge to 'appear that work is done all the time even if it's just meaningless bureaucracy, make everything slow and inefficient, but manage the expectations - so customer is moderately disappointed all the time but there are no catastrophic failures. And make sure there are no red lights on the dashboard, ever.'
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#87Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during…
I think even a tier-1 team could make it work for them, but the key is they would make it work for them (make it their own process).
Once you hire a scrum master to tell you how to do your work, you've sort of lost. They are rarely useful other than as sort of "priest" of the process, who ends up becoming another sort of management, but without management powers (usually).
The meetings etc. can be downright useful, in certain cases, but don't really make sense to follow religiously. I.e. if the devs themselves are running the meetings, for themselves, its a useful form of self-management, and you don't need much management skill to run it (any seasoned dev with any sort of communication capability can do it).
But if its imposed upon you, its just a cookie-cutter sort of management, which, doesn't fit all teams or scenarios.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#88It's sad that posts like these get so many points.
A sad take that's based on a sad experience with a great framework.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#89Anecdotes #6 and #7 in their list is a real indicator of something bad, wholly unrelated to Scrum.
> #6 We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points."
> #7 Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> […] hire top talent […] easy
Have you _tried_ hiring good people?