Live data from Hacker News

Scrum is a cancer

twitter.com

301–310 of 486 posts

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#301

My team does soft-agile. Month long sprints and minimal meetings. We treat it less like a rigid structure everyone must conform to and more of a way to organize backlog and delegate. It has worked very well for us, however we are a small and fairly siloed team and our stakeholders are highly technical people who consume our services internally. we get the leeway to self govern properly.

We have tried 2-3-4 week iterations, but keep coming back to 2 weeks. It's enough time to do something, but not so much people can get lost off track for a long time. But, we're also ok incrementally delivering features. No single feature has to be done in 2 weeks. Some take many iterations.

Also agree with minimal meetings. 1-2 meetings/iteration. When new people start we'll add some office hours time every other day as needed until they get up to speed.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#302
I haven't done a ton of Scrum in my career, but my observation of it, in concept at least, is that it's supposed to be sort of like training wheels for agile, which seems innocuous enough. What I have found particularly horrifying about some orgs adopting it is that the agile part (the part that's trickier to execute) gets thrown out the window in favor of what is basically waterfall with sprints, and then people eat it up like there's nothing profoundly wrong with the picture. Something like that is definitely a cancer.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#303
post #274

In 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…

Real Scrum has never been tried.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#304
post #287
post #274

In 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.

Have you ever seen the movie Office Space? There’s a bit about “TPS reports” where multiple managers individually correct the main character on a new cover sheet. I’ve experienced that myself. The movie portrays it comedically but IRL it’s kind of a demoralizing experience. A bit soul crushing actually.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#305
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After three months, the progress slowed to a crawl, star dev abandoned ship, and customers started complaining for the first time. > Now I will just wait for someone to tell me that this wasn't real Scrum either, because we were supposed to have Product Owner talk to the client instead of Scrum Master :) Oh wait till management finds engineers to scapegoat for their own decisions. If there is one truth about manage…

Of course. Because they don't produce outputs directly, reputation is all a manager has to prove their worth to the company. If you take that away by publicly demonstrating how their actions caused bad results, their boss might well fire them since they are apparently being a net negative. Managers face a much more difficult labor market than most engineers too. So to exaggerate a little bit, not accepting "I told yo…

You are not wrong. We both agree that the problem is the org structure as it stands. The incentives for layers and layers of management are divergent from the needs of the business and the needs of the producers of output.

Perhaps we need to reduce the number of levels, replace managers with technical leaders whose incentives are aligned with the needs of the business. Offload all grunt paper work to an executive assistant.

No need for EM1, EM2, EM3, Director, Sr Director, VP, SVP, SSVP nonsense.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#306
post #274

In 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…

Real Scrum has never been tried.

True Scrumunism? :)

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#307

The original article is apparently on linkedin (ugh but hey) https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7101572... Not extraordinarily insightful but an amusing take on occult ritualism as engineering.

Speaking of occult rituals, I think scrum started to go wrong when we were told to stop it with the chickens and pigs.

https://www.visual-paradigm.com/scrum/scrum-pig-and-chicken/

https://www.scrum.org/resources/chickens-and-pigs

That's when it stopped being about teamwork and started being about micromanagement.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#309
I got rejected from a job recently and I strongly suspect it was because I went on a rant about how awful scum was against my better judgement.

Something I've noticed in the last 3-5 years is that it's become more and more common for companies to quiz candidates on their scrum knowledge during interviews. They don't care what you think of scrum (though they may phase their questions like this) they simply want to know you know how to scrum because they scrum. And like in most places you can assume that although "scrum is flexible" it's also religiously followed in practise.

Anyway, this company wanted to know what I liked and disliked about scrum and my initial answer was kinda similar to this post – that I liked the idea of it but have never seen it work well in practise. Obviously this was a bad answer because it meant for the next 10 minutes of the interview they were asking me to expand and were trying to understand if I was a bad culture fit. Which to be fair I probably was.

But the truth is everywhere I've worked spirt ceremonies are universally hated and typically viewed as a waste of time (especially spirt reviews). Planning rarely adds much value and since estimates are often wrong you either need to be overly conservative with your estimation (rendering it useless), or you're forced to cut corners to deliver stuff on time. And even if you do estimation perfectly ACs always change and extra tickets are always brought into the spirt because "it's essential". Standup is never 15 minutes – it's 10 minutes per team member who likes to hear their own voice, and 30 seconds to those who don't and who just want to get on with their work. Don't even get me started on the team building games...

I have seen companies implement it better than others though. The place I work at the moment does it surprisingly well. We do standups which are mostly mandatory, but everything else is optional for the vast majority of the team.

Post reply on HN