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Scrum Sucks

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#61

Post by klysm »

BearOso wrote: post #58

The term scrum comes from rugby, and it has nothing to do with organization. It's literally when something goes wrong, pack everyone together and get the ball moving again. Symbolically, obviously, ball=project. The problem, like everything these days, is corporatism. Things have been added to the old development model to create positions for knowledgeless managers to do nothing and make money. Agile means fast witho…

Appeal-to-etymology is an especially weak form of argument - the origin from rugby doesn't matter.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#62

Post by freedomben »

simonjgreen wrote: post #13
JohnMakin wrote: post #4

I'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.

Yes, exactly! In my career I am usually the first ops/DevOps person on the team. These are usually startups who have been run by developers. Nothing wrong with that, I've spent most of my career as a developer. But there is typically a huge blind spot with developers when it comes to ops. That could be a whole blog post and will someday, but relevant here is that they often do not understand when I try to explain how poorly scrum fits with ops. It can be remarkably frustrating for both parties to discuss how to plan ops work. Even breaking the work down can be a battle. Traditional software developers like to push for little chunks of work broken down into tiny pieces. However, when you are talking about a task that is completely and utterly unknown, and could take weeks to result in a one or two line config change, it cannot be broken down without visiting the future, finding out everything we don't know yet, and returning and planning it meticulously. Unfortunately, we don't have that time machine yet

Re: Scrum Sucks

#63

Post by andrei_says_ »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I 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…

I really like Dave Thomas’ talk Agile is dead long live agile. Dave’s name is listed as one of the creators of the agile manifesto.

Basically, agile is an adjective. Anyone using it as a noun is selling snake oil. Yes, it is that bad - a whole industry built from the ground up to monetize a simple concept by enshittifying it into its very opposite.

https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M?si=tCvDcHYv7F77XbZ9

I also like Basecamp’s shape up process which seems to follow the spirit of the manifesto.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#64

Post by asylteltine »

Scrum sucks and much like HR it’s a made up field to get buddies employed for literally no ones benefit except their own department. Stand ups are never useful. Never. Not once in the history of the human race has an engineer ever though man I’m so glad I read out the state of a jira ticket to someone who doesn’t even know how to push a git commit.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#65

Post by tomohawk »

Works great for us. Things that usually indicate that you're not working with agility: spending more than 10% of your time on process/meetings, have professional project managers 100% dedicated to processes, team unaware of mid and long term direction, team talks about scrum stuff instead of what they're working on, ...

I've learned to avoid any shop that has professional project managers doing what they term "the agile processes" instead of the team itself, as those shops are generally buzzword compliant cargo cult ghettos.

I get the "no true scrum master" thing. It's real. However, I was trained by Ken Schwaber, and I'd say most shops who say they're doing scrum are not doing anything that actually resembles that training, other than the lingo.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#66

Post by marginalia_nu »

robterrell wrote: post #19
Aurornis wrote: post #7

I 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.

One of the most reliable indicators I know of a dysfunctional team is on average how many times whether what being proposed is sufficiently agile is put to question per meeting. If this is greater than some epsilon much smaller than 1, then you have trouble.

Overall "is that really agile though?" is such a fantastic thought stopper. It's can be thrown out to derail any sort of proceeding. It moves all focus from what's practical and applicable and relevant to the situation at hand, and moves it to an endless discussion about philsophical alignment.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#67

Post by libraryatnight »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

I 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…

I feel like SCRUM and anything like it is an attempt to formula and process-ify a thing that dies when you do exactly that. At my company we waste a ton of time on this stuff but we also have a ton of people with jobs that really only tie in to it so they will always defend it. Bureaucracy serves itself etc.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#68

Post by Scubabear68 »

Zigurd wrote: post #20
Scubabear68 wrote: post #10

One 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.

Agreed. This is more or less what we did in the 90s, deliver quickly and incrementally with right-sized processes.

Scrum adds so much complexity, heavy processes and endless meetings it is truly incredible.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#69

Post by [deleted] »

shortlived wrote: post #27

The things I've taken from scrum and use at every team: - plan in 2 week chunks - estimate in points (relative size to something you've already done), emphasis on consistent estimates for each dev. - make sure you define what 'done' means, and make sure it relates to what exactly you are trying to measure (Eg just coding effort, work till feature can ship?, etc). This is probably the most tricky bit. - capture total…

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