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Scrum Sucks
31–40 of 298 posts
Re: Scrum Sucks
#32I 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…
No True Scrum Master... should get its own Wikipedia entry at last.
(Ah, too late. Guess I should have refreshed)
Re: Scrum Sucks
#33I’ve seen “scrum” work. The single most important thing we did was the retro always happened. In the retro we somehow managed to create a safe space where we could honestly discuss ways to improve. This may never be repeatable depending on the culture of the company, but the goal of a retro is to be a safe space where honesty is possible. Without honesty there can be no improvement to the process. Is some ceremony providing no value? That should come up in the retro. Proposed fixes should surface in the retro. Maybe you dump the ceremony, or do it less often. Ceremony is sort of stupid in general, but it’s often there because historically for some large percent of teams it was useful occassionally. It may not be useful for your team.
Retros are hard. Managers will try to run them. People can’t be honest with managers present. At least half an hour of the retro should be without the manager present. Retros should should also be long enough they feel slightly painful. There are people who have a hard time finding their voice in a group setting, especially with difficult topics. Giving them time and opportunity to speak is essential.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#34You forgot adding lengthy descriptions and constant updates to each ticket. The person who pushes the most tickets and with most words per ticket gets promoted. You're better off spending time optimizing JIRA than doing actual work.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#35I was not aware that PMs aren't supposed to lead scrum. I've only ever seen it done that way.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#36Bullshit clickbait is bullshit clickbait. Scrum doesn't inherently suck. Scrum can work if you do it right. It won't if you don't. Just leaving it up to the individual team leads to the same result. If the team sucks at managing their work, the team will suck at managing their work. It doesn't matter what you follow if you suck at it. This isn't as catchy and feel-good as the bullshit clickbait that reinforces what y…
I don't have any love for 'scrum' but, I tend to agree with this.
It's reductive to say we should just use tools the right way, but also, we don't say a hammer sucks when we use it to try drive screws into wood.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#37I 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 last org I was in realized how much time their engineers were spending in agile-caused meetings, much like what you describe, at least half of the working hours in a week - so they made a company-wide rule that no one could spend more than 4 hours a week in meetings.
What happened instead were impromptu "ghost" meetings and a ton of stuff done sloppily over chat instead, where I think the hope was that people would try to become "more efficient" with their meeting time.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#38Aside: 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.
Lately I've been realising just how many sites will not even show the main content without JavaScript enabled.
You mean to tell me you need JavaScript to show me a blog post that's 90% text?
Medium does surprisingly good without JavaScript, I can read comfortably without the nonsense.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#39Bullshit clickbait is bullshit clickbait. Scrum doesn't inherently suck. Scrum can work if you do it right. It won't if you don't. Just leaving it up to the individual team leads to the same result. If the team sucks at managing their work, the team will suck at managing their work. It doesn't matter what you follow if you suck at it. This isn't as catchy and feel-good as the bullshit clickbait that reinforces what y…
It's something with the argument "X can work if you do it right" that feels really off.
If it's hard to do it right, maybe it wasn't that good of an idea from the beginning?
You don't hear that argument about things that actually works.
Re: Scrum Sucks
#40You know when some tools have a section When to use X and When not to use X ? (e.g.
https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/). Management frameworks like Scrum should have the same, and should not be followed blindly. There are specific historical contexts and reasons why they were invented and those should not be ignored.
So, when is Scrum a good fit, and when is it not?