From a more constructive "what is there besides scrum" I've been enjoying this persons blog and especially his book on software systems: https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
Scrum Sucks
11–20 of 298 posts
Re: Scrum Sucks
#12I agree that agile methodologies are a whole lot of bullshit, but the problem really is cargo cult.
Most people working in software are juniors, and that includes most managers. The fact that they have a title of "VP operations" 2 years after graduating does not magically make them experienced. What do they do then? They read books about "how to lead a team", and they blindly apply what they find there.
Because they have no clue. Many times they have not even had a team lead in there professional career themselves: they jumped right into management. And of course their team of junior developers (with high titles that don't make them experienced either) don't know better. So it ends up in a big cargo cult. Which sucks.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#13I've seen it suck even worse when trying to manage large X-Ops organizations. Something about the work, let's call it DevOps for the sake of simplicity, simply does not seem to lend itself well to the scrum methodology. Often priorities will shift rapidly even during the course of 1 working day, issues are vaguely defined and poorly scoped by nature (AZ1 cannot reach AZ2, plz fix ASAP), and the work is extraordinaril…
See this all the time. There is a huge distinction between teams that are oriented to be proactively planned and teams that are oriented to be reactive. Neither is bad and both need to exist. Things will break people will have to fix them and therefore reactive work will exist.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#14I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…
The far biggest time sink is not what you logged though, but how you need to pad estimates and delay work to please the Scrum Lords.
Like, the burndown chart has to be nice and steadely go to zero. There is no way to do that without decoupling reported hours and estimated hours from actual hours. Or points. It doesn't matter which.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#15I've seen it suck even worse when trying to manage large X-Ops organizations. Something about the work, let's call it DevOps for the sake of simplicity, simply does not seem to lend itself well to the scrum methodology. Often priorities will shift rapidly even during the course of 1 working day, issues are vaguely defined and poorly scoped by nature (AZ1 cannot reach AZ2, plz fix ASAP), and the work is extraordinaril…
See this all the time. There is a huge distinction between teams that are oriented to be proactively planned and teams that are oriented to be reactive. Neither is bad and both need to exist. Things will break people will have to fix them and therefore reactive work will exist.
I've seen this handled in various ways. Usually, the scrum master/PM will set aside extra "bandwidth" during a period that is expected to be heavy in interruptions. However, getting that right is almost impossible, and you can easily end up with way too much work in a sprint or way too little.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#16Aside: We need an alternate viewing filter for medium like how nitter is to X.
Every time I open a medium hosted link it is just unbearable.
Edit: The firefox reader view (F9) works very well at getting rid of Medium nonsense and making it clean.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#17[deleted]
Re: Scrum Sucks
#18It's even worse when they try to apply it to hardware.
Yes, I have been in some nightmare scenario's with 'project managers' that did that. Nightmare.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#19I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…
> the Scrum proponents will rush in and tell me that we were doing it wrong
The "no true scrumsman" fallacy at work.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#20One comment - the article mentions that Waterfall was basically the only approach used prior to agile. This is false. In some industries waterfall was used, but in others software was designed and driven incrementally just as with core agile. The work I did in fixed income brokerages in the early 90s was largely ad hoc agile.
Scrum is just one offshoot of Agile. It has become laden with jargon, Scrum-specific job titles, and rapidly trained Scrum Masters.
This obscures the fact that a competent team can start with traditional jobs and roles and use The Manifesto for Agile Software Development as their guide, with some modifications for a remote, Slack/Zoom world.
Don't be afraid to dump Scrum.