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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#411

Post by oweiler »

hibikir wrote: post #288
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…

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…

There is the old saying that scrum turns bad devs into mediocre devs and good devs into mediocre ones.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#412

Post by t43562 »

mbfg wrote: post #323

it's very religion like... The say they are doing scrum, but they aren't really doing scrum He says he's a christian but it's clear to me that he wasn't one all along.

Lots of people claim to be Christians but don't forgive, turn the other cheek or love their neighbors because it doesn't suit them to but it does suit them to claim to be Christian.

So any successfully communicated methodology is going to be claimed by lots of hypocrits and then perverted while they simultaneously boast how much they love it.

And then you'll get the opposite kind of person who doesn't believe in forgiveness or loving their neighbors and sees a great chance to attack those ideas by supporting the hypocrits deception and claiming that their perversion is the real (evil) religion.

None of this helps software get built but is just a power struggle between developers who don't want to reduce the bus factor or despecialise or write tests or do maintenance or change their great plans to suit circumstances.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#413

Post by genezeta »

IKantRead wrote: post #328

I still chuckle a bit when people get anti-scrum, because I've been around long enough when agile/scrum was the disruptive thing. Of course in practice agile/scrum/whatever has turned into the same cargo-cult nonsense that the original promoters of the ideals were fighting against. One thing I thought was interesting was: > First, the most common jobs among the people who told me I was wrong were "Agile Coach" and "S…

I don't think that part is so much about the job titles themselves. It's more about the interests/motivations. As in "I said smoking was bad and a lot of people that worked in selling tobacco told me I was wrong and that smoking was perfectly healthy".

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#414

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

Our 15 minute standups were about an hour, sometimes longer. The project manager aka scrum master spent at least 80% of those minutes talking. They were scheduled for 11:30am, right when everyone was either wanting to go to lunch, or for people not taking lunch probably the most productive middle part of the day. For those who went to lunch afterward, they never got to start before 12:30pm, and were out to at least 1:30pm. So it sort of wrecked the start of the afternoon too. Not that it didn't wreck the lead-up either, because if you have that crap looming over you at 10:45am you sort of shut down any important thinking you need to do... best not get caught up in what you are doing, because if you're 1 minute late for the standup, there's hell to pay.

But, what little progress there was, was easily measured. That seems to be the important part.

Lunatics run this asylum.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#415

Post by t43562 »

Scarblac wrote: post #293
stillbourne wrote: post #281

"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.

I think it's Scrum that's a cult, agile works fine in the rare place that does it. But to me it just means trusting the devs, close cooperation within the team and with the customer, iterative development, continuously refining the bits of process you have to fit the needs of the devs at the moment. Not something you have conferences about.

What's the difference between what you're talking about and scrum? IMO the conferences are really there because the way companies think about projects and plans is not agile and it's difficult to marry up the higher level decision making with the way that agile makes decisions much faster. I don't think there has really been a solution to this.

Agile roughly says that if you find out that what you're doing is stupid or impossible then change and do something that will work. If it turns out that the goals of the company are stupid or won't work how does it "realise" that? Lets say you're fulfilling a contract - you really need to go to your customer and tell them that what they want will end up being of low quality at the time and price you've agreed and that adjustments have to be made if they want a success. I cannot see any incentive to try to do such a thing so it's at odds with agile from the start.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#416

Post by baal80spam »

bitwize wrote: post #303
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…

Real Scrum has never been tried.

https://imgflip.com/i/7xhfm6

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#417

Post by t43562 »

brailsafe wrote: post #313
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 l…

scrum masters should only bother you at the standup. They also shouldn't add requirements.

So .... the one you were dealing with was just an average bullshitter pretending to do scrum.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#418

Post by Scarblac »

t43562 wrote: post #415
Scarblac wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's Scrum that's a cult, agile works fine in the rare place that does it. But to me it just means trusting the devs, close cooperation within the team and with the customer, iterative development, continuously refining the bits of process you have to fit the needs of the devs at the moment. Not something you have conferences about.

What's the difference between what you're talking about and scrum? IMO the conferences are really there because the way companies think about projects and plans is not agile and it's difficult to marry up the higher level decision making with the way that agile makes decisions much faster. I don't think there has really been a solution to this. Agile roughly says that if you find out that what you're doing is stupid…

Scrum is a strictly defined process, it has Scrum Masters, Product Owners, certifications, books, a number of defined meetings, sprints...

Sort of the opposite of agile.

> Agile roughly says that if you find out that what you're doing is stupid or impossible then change and do something that will work

Exactly. But with Scrum, if devs complain it's not working, the certified Scrum Master will just say what you're doing right now isn't exactly Scrum to the letter yet, you need more Scrum.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#419

Post by hankchinaski »

mm263 wrote: post #399
hankchinaski wrote: post #308

Scrum is a good tool for a bad manager https://www.yegor256.com/2015/01/08/morning-standup-meetings...

This dude talks about directly punishing people for not meeting deadlines and monetary rewards for completing tasks. This is weird, patronizing, de-motivating. I would run from him as fast as possible. > She already knows what she is working for, and she is motivated enough. When she finishes on time, organize a meeting and give her a $500 check in front of everybody. This is what a good manager uses meetings for.

the article is satire - at least i consider it so - but it describes the whole scrum charade pretty well

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#420

Post by t43562 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #414
ahtihn wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Our 15 minute standups were about an hour, sometimes longer. The project manager aka scrum master spent at least 80% of those minutes talking. They were scheduled for 11:30am, right when everyone was either wanting to go to lunch, or for people not taking lunch probably the most productive middle part of the day. For those who went to lunch afterward, they never got to start before 12:30pm, and were out to at least 1…

So it wasn't scrum. It was just bullshitters using the word and doing what they wanted to do anyhow.
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