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Scrum Sucks

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#81

Post by davidham »

None of the things the author complains about are specified in Scrum. The Scrum guide states that the developers choose the work: "Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint." I've also heard people complain about the meetings, but honestly people hate meetings generally--my current team doesn't do Scrum or any other agile system, and we still have several time-wasting meetings every week. In my experience, scrum reduces the meetings you need to have to a minimum, and each one is there for a reason. If you use each meeting for its reason, they are valuable, if not, then sure, they probably are a waste of time.

I know that scrum has often been weaponized by managers and tools, but scrum doesn't prescribe this. Scrum doesn't prescribe story points or velocity or burndown charts. Those things may suck at your company, but they're not Scrum's fault.

Personally I like Scrum. I like the focus of the sprint goal and I like being able to show what I did at the end of the sprint. My team, as I say, has no process, and I started implementing scrum just for myself and my projects, that I work on solo. It's not perfect or ideal but it's better than any other system I've seen.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#82

Post by Cpoll »

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.

It's not a "no true Scotsman" (scrumsman :)) if the counterexample is in fact not a Scotsman.

Whether it is or isn't depends on your feelings on scrum, but it's not a fallacy to try to defend the initial definition before it was co-opted by anyone with an Agile cert.

"Hammers suck at driving nails." "You're holding a rubber mallet." "No true Scotsman!"

Re: Scrum Sucks

#83

Post by edgyquant »

hknmtt wrote: post #42

Scrum/Agile is awesome! I always used the daily calls to ask as much dumb shit as possible to make the meetings as long as i could so i could keep charging my hourly rate without actually working.

And I have gotten rid of people who were very clearly just being pedantic during every meeting and then would have a million questions (or just not build things to spec) when it came to time to actually work.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#84

Post by bluGill »

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…

I have long abandoned scrum for Kanban. I don't care about sprints, and getting things done by the end. Just give me (or since I'm the team leader now often I'm the one giving) the next thing to work on and when it is done I'll start the next. Nobody cares about what you got done this sprint, they care about what what got into the next release. Next release includes a lot of manual testing as despite a very great automated test program we constantly discover a lot of serious bugs in manual test that are difficult to automate.

we gave up on points. All anyone cares about is days. Thus it is better to retro on the days estimate vs days to deliver and make adjustments on our end. Nobody cares about days for an individual story anyway - they want the days for the complete feature (or at least enough of the feature that we can ship it)

Re: Scrum Sucks

#85

Post by m3kw9 »

Here is a typical scrum meeting:

7-10 people gather in a circle every day, they all say “no blockers” or some talkative person diggs up some detail that sounds like it’s for another discussion, then they repeat “continuing to what I did yesterday” because we all already know, the scrum master tries to say something new but it sounds like BS, meeting over and we are all shaking our heads thinking “another waste of 10 minutes”

Re: Scrum Sucks

#86

Post by flir »

yieldcrv wrote: post #41
rightbyte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I saw this on my last job! I was already adding time to my work like an extra point or two here and there But then in the grooming session the whole team would guesstimate even more story points! I was dumbfounded! This was beyond all of my levels of tolerance and rationality but it kept happening every sprint until something that was a 0.5 for me was a 5 point and I would have two 5 point tickets for the whole sprin…

That kind of inflation corrects for itself. Because you're supposed to look at the previous sprints to judge how many points you'll get through this sprint.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#87

Post by boringg »

I wish there was an executive scrum that the rest of the company could see what their work load was for the week and how it was co-ordinated.

My feeling on scrum was it was always a way to daylight what people were doing for upper levels (and co-ordinating that work). It would be nice to see what higher echelons were actually working on.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#88

Post by charles_f »

Boy, is this right on point!

> I really believe there is one, but I have never seen a single engineer happy about their company Scrum implementation.

Yeah, I think that's an example of good idea but too easy to badly implement. With cargo cult and all that, people try to take it ready-made and don't event try to understand why things are done a certain way. Result is unavoidable garbage. I've never seen a good implementation as well

> One is on sick leave and the other has a well-deserved PTO or holiday. Does your team still attend the stand-up meeting?

In my manager years, I've been using this as a metric. If I'm not there and meetings don't happen, it's probably a sign that the meeting isn't useful.

> Sidenote: I always disliked this religious term used to define these kind of meetings, but ok.

I've always read that as sarcasm though, precisely because ceremonies and masses happen religiously without questioning whether they should exist

Re: Scrum Sucks

#89

Post by candiddevmike »

lowercased wrote: post #46
rightbyte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"POINTS AREN'T TIME! THEY'RE EFFORT AND/OR COMPLEXITY!" I've been routinely told. Yet... low complexity stuff was expected to take less time, even if it was high effort. All 'in my experience' of course. Changing 95 files because someone didn't want to centralize some value in a method call last year (YAGNI!) is now high effort, even if low complexity. Then... "that's too many files in a PR! break it up! no one can r…

I love hearing "points aren't time but you can think of them like days"

Re: Scrum Sucks

#90

Post by Foobar8568 »

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 had some coworkers who would spend 6hours in scrum related meeting every Tuesday....In addition to their daily 2h scrum meetings ( multiple teams and role meeting coordination).
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