"Agile is a cult." Is a refrain I've had for a few years. I don't mean like the agile process, I mean the agile culture. I went to an agile conference for work and the things they talked about were just really really dumb, I swear they almost professed that agile could cure cancer.
Scrum is a cancer
281–290 of 486 posts
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#282In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…
More likely they'll just blame you, just like the sibling comment says...
Their goal was never increased productivity and developer hapiness. It was literally what they said "introducing scrum and bringing in a scrum master". Their purpose is to add and manage processes (bureucratic layers) and increase their dependants.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#283I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter. But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings. Scrum, imo, exists so that management and busines…
>I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter.
All 10 of the former?
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#284I don’t mind scrum, specifically the daily stand up. In an old job a couple non-contributors became obvious. And so has been my work ethic. I benefit from that because I’m naturally the kind of person to get things done. Despite my good feelings about it, I also see how often it’s used as a) an excuse to micromanage and b) a mechanism to feed leadership’s need for attention. I don’t know if this is accurate or not, b…
> I think overall it’s a bit of a waste of time for me
The company isn't trying to optimize for best use of your time individually or to make you happy. They are trying to get some kind of result. And it very well may be worth inconveniencing and annoying higher performers to improve the performance of lower performers to achieve the result they want.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#285I don’t mind scrum, specifically the daily stand up. In an old job a couple non-contributors became obvious. And so has been my work ethic. I benefit from that because I’m naturally the kind of person to get things done. Despite my good feelings about it, I also see how often it’s used as a) an excuse to micromanage and b) a mechanism to feed leadership’s need for attention. I don’t know if this is accurate or not, b…
> In an old job a couple non-contributors became obvious.
So your management wasn't doing their job? They're supposed to know who's working and who isn't regardless of what rituals are practiced.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#286Arbitrariness, disconnection from purpose, jargon, standups being badly structured meetings, disempowered product "owners," etc. are reasons to call it "cancer." Agile was needed, to replace waterfall management of software development projects. In particular, trying to do resource leveled critical path analysis for most software projects is the road to project hell. But, yeah, Scrum, as too many Scrum Masters practi…
I thought agile “fixed” waterfall because waterfall had all this effort go into a product only to get feedback at the end, which to me sounds like a failure of product not engineering. By having tighter feedback loops it was promised less man-hours would be spent. My impression is it’s changed what the man-hours are spent on. It’s harder to get an elegant architecture over 2-3 years of agile as opposed to waterfall where it can be more tightly controlled. That’s probably the limit of my perspective on the matter. I am positive there are others that know more and have a more accurate perspective on why and how things changed.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#287In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…
Ah yes the defence:
"The process failed because you didn't have enough project managers on board"
No the process failed because it was fucking shit and everyone went somewhere else.
The only good thing heavy processes are for are propping up employment statistics.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#288In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…
The best I can say of scrum is that it's designed to get some amount of output from an otherwise extremely dysfunctional team. If your teams were achieving nothing, it provides a modicum of accountability. So there's places where yes, scrum is an improvement.
But yes, a team of people that understand the business, and can prioritize well without needing someone to do it all for them, scrum just slows the team down. I've seen it happen multiple times in my career, and sometimes succeeded at either undoing the change, or making the jira-based work basically fictional.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#289In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…
More likely they'll just blame you, just like the sibling comment says... Their goal was never increased productivity and developer hapiness. It was literally what they said "introducing scrum and bringing in a scrum master". Their purpose is to add and manage processes (bureucratic layers) and increase their dependants.
aka: micro-manage, because they don’t understand the effort and cost…or if you’re cynical because you’ve experienced it, some middle manager desperately needs to control other people because they subconsciously know their position is 90% absolute dead weight. Maybe that’s a bit too negative, sorry.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#290I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter. But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings. Scrum, imo, exists so that management and busines…
> I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter. All 10 of the former?
Well - since he did say they were mostly people with the title 'scrum master' or 'agile coach' defending it, perhaps a better phrasing is "people whose livelihoods depend on it" :)