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Scrum Sucks

blog.mb-consulting.dev

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#121

Post by Tao3300 »

madspindel wrote: post #39
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #25

Bullshit 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.

Conversely, "X can really suck if you do it wrong" is true of pretty much everything.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#122

Post by Scubabear68 »

wkrause13 wrote: post #100
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 recently dealt with the same thing. We had an experienced CTO come in and implement a “big company” style of Agile. In all fairness, there was a lack of process that needed to be addressed, but the pendulum swung very much too far in the other direction. He left the company and I stepped up to fill the gap. First thing I did was quantify the amount of time the team was spending in meetings and it was over 25%. Thos…

Interesting, I have a very similar story from last year. Existing CTO and head of product acted as if they were writing complex, mission critical software (they weren’t) and instituted processes to match. It went from overly ad hoc to over-the-top scrum. As a result, features took months to develop and everyone was terrified of releases. Teams bloated to massive size.

CTO was fired, I came in and evaluated everything, slashed the consulting teams down to the ones clearly performing, and slashed the processes down to boot. Within a month the team velocity was way up and we were releasing to a nice cadence without fear.

And this was not because I’m a super man. I’m not. Any competent tech lead or manager could have done the same. The only difficult part was dragging the product folks along, they kicked and screamed the whole way, predicting doom, and were amazed when the sky didn’t fall.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#123

Post by ajmurmann »

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 personally strongly dislike a lot of aspects in SCRUM (individual commitments stick out especially, together with the entire role of Scrum Master), but am not sure I see an alternative for some form of agile (without the TM), that is adjusted to the individual team's needs, for the vast majority of teams. Whenever I read these criticisms, a lot of it rings true, but I fail to understand what the alternatives looks like besides Waterfall or chaos. Whoever does these write-ups always complains about some Agile™ thing, but takes the alternative for granted. What activities and meetings would be dropped or replaces and by what? It's not very meaningful to criticize something when comparing it to nothing.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#124

Post by lucidguppy »

nso95 wrote: post #109
lucidguppy wrote: post #47

Holy shit people - scrum does not work without a fundamental understanding of the theory of constraints. If you're burndown chart isn't burning down, something is blocking your team. A manager finds out what is blocking the team and works on it. If your team has a bunch of tickets in process- then your WIP is high - that's bad. Someone taking on more tickets to just get to work should be pulling the equivalent of an…

Aren't story points (estimates) usually part of scrum?

Scrum is usually more flexible than most people realize.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#125

Post by j4yav »

Scrum was my first real experience where I saw marketing people and consultants take something beautiful and just smash it into the ground and turn it into a parasitic money and time suck, a twisted parody of what it was meant to be. It made me more cynical but perhaps better prepared when things like that happened later in my career, like DevOps.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#127

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

torginus wrote: post #107
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…

Never in my life have I encountered anyone from the engineering side who spoke positively about scrum. It's always the consultants and scrum masters and their ilk who push the agenda. Never have I ever heard about any story about agile making things better.

I’ve seen it to be very effective but it is rare - especially in enterprises where the old “project office” folk switched to being scrum masters.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#128

Post by xbar »

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…

Sounds like an agile application of scrum.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#129

Post by CSMastermind »

Scrum/Agile as it's practiced was invented in large part at consulting companies who were dealing with toxic clients. If you need a methodology to defensively manage a bad client then it's a pretty good cool.

As for the other parts there's a general problem of people applying a tool they don't understand. The benefit of a daily scrum meeting is not to remove blockers. If you think that's the point of the meeting then you've failed already. It's to build team camaraderie through repeated casual interactions. If you think it's there to remove blockers than you're tempted to try to eliminate those casual interactions instead of facilitate them and you end up doing the opposite - you erode team culture.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#130

Post by agumonkey »

palata wrote: post #12

I 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…

And they self reinforce themselves in their biases. As long they say it's an epic and have a burndown chart they feel good. Nothing works, information is lost, quality and velocity is low, but we're very much agile.
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