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

311–320 of 486 posts

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#311

Post by JohnMakin »

one of my former companies went all in on scrum/agile/whatever you want to call it.

In ops, I think sprints work uniquely terribly. Lots of super urgent tasks come up in a normal workday that aren't always captured in the workload or capacity planning, and some times are much more interrupt driven than others, leading to similar issues.

Another issue I had with it, it did not really encourage me to be super productive . Like, I took on 16 story points this sprint, finished them all in a week, what possible incentive do I have to take something off the backlog and squeeze it into this sprint when my teammates (some of whom are paid more than me) are doing half of the "points" I am? It creates tension where I don't think any is needed. To make things worse, the system is easily gamed.

Another thing is I think it created way way more meetings than was needed.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#312

Post by ourmandave »

lpapez wrote: 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…

What (or who) made them decide they needed scrum in the first place?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#313

Post by brailsafe »

lpapez wrote: 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…

My most informative experience was had at this huge auction company that I was doing frontend on. At one point, I was working on what we'd now call a component, but was at that time manually created dom elements generated with a very long series of logic branches that depended on a number of external, possibly async conditions. It was extremely hard and time consuming to test and keep all of the possible conditions loaded into my consciousness with all of the chatter in the surrounding space and some fuckhead making sales calls on his phone and typing on his mechanical keyboard—because y'know, everyone's gotta be in the same room—meanwhile the product owner would come over to add new requirements while I was trying to focus and then the scrum master would come over to ask why I wasn't done yet. This went on until my productivity and motivation ground to a halt, I burnt out, got depressed, and got fired. However, when I started at the company, it was surprisingly fine. I worked with two other guys collaboratively on some tricky frontend issues, which we solved, and it was fine.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#314

Post by siva7 »

lpapez wrote: 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…

This wasn't scrum because talking to the costumer is the primary job of the Product Owner and not of the Scrum Master. PO is also a full time job and not some side hustle of a team lead or SM. Having a good Product Owner makes the difference between adopting scrum successfully or failing at this process.

Regarding why your team failed - i've been in a similiar scenario like you as a team lead. The answer is simple - no one in your team was open to adopting scrum so it failed. That's fine but it's not the fault of scrum rather than the company management.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#315

Post by projectazorian »

baz00 wrote: post #287
lpapez wrote: 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.

Heavy process is fine and necessary if you are building, say, a skyscraper or a nuclear reactor.

Most of us are not.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#316

Post by AnimalMuppet »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #310
notjoemama wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True Scrumunism? :)

Well, technically OP described anarcho-development.

If you've got people who don't need bosses, that can work really well. If you impose clueless bosses on those who don't need them, they will often leave.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#317

Post by chriskanan »

lpapez wrote: 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…

This was exactly my experience, but many more months than 3.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#318

Post by nine_zeros »

notjoemama wrote: post #304
baz00 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Office space is actually accurate once you replace TPS reports with Status reports/JIRA tickets/Performance reports/Incident reports etc.

The amount of dancing required for the sake of management in this industry is just insane.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#320

Post by lolinder »

siva7 wrote: post #314
lpapez wrote: 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…

This wasn't scrum because talking to the costumer is the primary job of the Product Owner and not of the Scrum Master. PO is also a full time job and not some side hustle of a team lead or SM. Having a good Product Owner makes the difference between adopting scrum successfully or failing at this process. Regarding why your team failed - i've been in a similiar scenario like you as a team lead. The answer is simple -…

I honestly can't tell, because you don't have a history of joke comments and didn't include a /s. Is this intentional parody, or did you miss OP's closing line?

> 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 :)

Post reply on HN