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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#401

Post by hbn »

ahtihn wrote: post #374
username332211 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I objected to this and listed all of the problems I could see if Scrum was introduced: losing dev creativity and incentive, tickets taking exactly one sprint to complete instead of doing them at leisurely pace, the mistranslation coming from having one extra layer of communication (Scrum Master handling the client now). And that was your big mistake. Those are real concerns, but those things are abstract and non-qu…

> The proper way to fight scrum is to measure the time it takes to perform the scrum 'ceremonies'. It's rarely less than 30% of the total work time in a sprint. 50% seems to be very common. I do not understand how this is possible. * Sprint planning: 2 hours * Sprint review: 1 hour * Sprint retro: 1 hour * Daily stand-up: 15min / day On a 2 week sprint, 80 hours, that's 5.5 hours spent on ceremonies. That's ~7%. What…

At my job we have

  * pre-planning - 30m
  * planning - 30m
  * refinement - 90m
  * ultra refinement - 90m
  * retro - 60m
Combine that with daily standup, a once-weekly meeting to just hang out for 30m or so, check-in with manager, team meetings (meetings for everyone under a particular manager), multiple demos per week from various areas of the company (technically optional, I don't go to most of them), all-staff meetings, ad-hoc meetings with people from other areas of the company for specific work when they're a dependency or stakeholder, etc.

It's laughable.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#403

Post by skeeter2020 »

If you thing scrum is bad, try adopting scaled agile. It's so bad that our new CEO who introduced it less than a year ago tried to pull the Steve Jobs reality distortion trick to convince everyone in a recent all hands that "we're not Scaled Agile, we never have been. We used little parts of it to make something better that's all our own".

What you need to recognize with all these processes that go beyond the direct dev team is that they are not there for the devs. They're for senior leadership and non-technical executives to pretend they can have their cake (agile with responsive and constant delivery) and eat it too (waterfall with scheduled "final" delivery). It still sucks but this understanding does help you survive.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#404

Post by aidenn0 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #344

This guy is a grifter with uninformed, ranty opinions, and it's a shame he is getting so many of these HN eyeballs for his purposefully provocative nonsense. Here's my more comprehensive post the last time this was raised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37289151#37290237 The TL;DR is that he's just making unsubstantiated angry ravings and being treated like he's saying something meaningful because there are peo…

I think the reason he's getting upvotes is that a lot of people have had similar experiences. It should be obvious that adopting Scrum won't fix a dysfunctional organization[1]; nothing in the previous post, nor this one argues more than that.

I'm more interested in some of the comments I have seen here of people observing the adoption of Scrum as significantly reducing the velocity at what was previously observed to be well run. Maybe adopting the more formal process revealed an underlying organizational dysfunction that could remain hidden in the previous laissez-faire culture, maybe there's something wrong with how Scrum gets implemented at those places, and maybe there's actually something wrong with Scrum itself.

My only interaction with things explicitly described as "agile" (Scrum, or otherwise) appeared to be very large organizations mostly just renaming roles and processes that already existed, with a few minor changes that did not appear to have any effect (other than being able to claim that they were now "agile"), so I don't have any personal experience to answer any of these questions.

1: Though in defense of the ranters, you'll be able to find many Scrum consultants that will argue it can.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#405

Post by f1shy »

nottorp wrote: post #285
notjoemama wrote: post #276

I 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.

If he was force to use Scrum, they were GOD DAMM NOT DOING THEIR JOB!

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#406

Post by adrianmsmith »

ahtihn wrote: post #374
username332211 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I objected to this and listed all of the problems I could see if Scrum was introduced: losing dev creativity and incentive, tickets taking exactly one sprint to complete instead of doing them at leisurely pace, the mistranslation coming from having one extra layer of communication (Scrum Master handling the client now). And that was your big mistake. Those are real concerns, but those things are abstract and non-qu…

> The proper way to fight scrum is to measure the time it takes to perform the scrum 'ceremonies'. It's rarely less than 30% of the total work time in a sprint. 50% seems to be very common. I do not understand how this is possible. * Sprint planning: 2 hours * Sprint review: 1 hour * Sprint retro: 1 hour * Daily stand-up: 15min / day On a 2 week sprint, 80 hours, that's 5.5 hours spent on ceremonies. That's ~7%. What…

One place I worked at had two week sprints.

Week 1: One whole day for demo, retro, planning, commitment. But because the scrum master had to "build" a sprint and couldn't do that without knowing the size of tickets, there were two morning meetings every week to "analyse" tickets. So two mornings for "analysis" to produce point estimates for tickets.

Week 2: Also two mornings for "analysis".

So 3 days out of the 10 day sprint, so 30% time spent on Scrum.

Plus standups, they were at 10am so 9am-10am nobody did anything (as judged by the number of PRs and comments and Slack activity) so that's an hour plus the time for standup every single day, so I guess the work day started 10:30am on those days which weren't scrum days or scrum mornings.

Plus the scrum "analysis" meetings were in the morning as it was generally accepted everyone was too tired in the afternoon to to those meetings. So what that actually meant imho was that programming was a low-importance activity that could be done when tired, after the actual work of Scrum had been completed.

Maybe that's insanity, I mean I certainly thought so, but these things do happen.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#407

Post by pillefitz »

kenada wrote: post #350

I’ve had good experiences with scrum. I was on a team that was empowered to own and refine its practice. We were able to halve our cycle time and improve sprint planning to the point where we rarely overcommitted. It was great, and it was credited with the successful delivery of a major project. Unfortunately, our management changed, and we were no longer empowered. The new manager had his own ideas for how things sh…

What was the replacement process?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#408

Post by IshKebab »

username332211 wrote: post #354
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…

> I objected to this and listed all of the problems I could see if Scrum was introduced: losing dev creativity and incentive, tickets taking exactly one sprint to complete instead of doing them at leisurely pace, the mistranslation coming from having one extra layer of communication (Scrum Master handling the client now). And that was your big mistake. Those are real concerns, but those things are abstract and non-qu…

50%?? Scrum is like a 1-2 hour planning/retrospective meeting per fortnight plus 10-15 minute standups every 1-2 days. How could that possibly take 50% of your time?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#409

Post by retrocryptid »

f1shy wrote: post #400
projectazorian wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy process is fine and necessary if you are building, say, a skyscraper or a nuclear reactor. Most of us are not.

I'm not even sure in that case...

Having written code for a nuclear power plant, I can say, yes, you want some process. But you want effective process. And a lot of thought went into deciding what code was "safety critical" and what code was just "important."

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#410

Post by koliber »

Scrum is a descent way to get a relatively immature team to get work done. There are other more effective ways to get work done if you have an experienced and mature team.

This article from 2021 illustrates the different ways of running projects and the tradeoffs that are involved:

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...

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