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Scrum Sucks

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#141

Post by Aurornis »

Cpoll wrote: post #82
robterrell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!"

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

Every bad Scrum/Agile situation I've been in has orchestrated by people who were convinced they were doing it "the right way"

Every defense I've read has been from other people who weren't there who insist that it must be "the wrong way".

If you define the "right way" such that it can only be good, then you conveniently dismiss all of the negative criticisms at once. Yet in the real world, there appear to be a lot of us stuck in companies who think they're doing it by the book but it's still not working out.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#142

Post by kurko »

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…

My hypothesis is that those people I worked with circa 2007-2015 that did Scrum really well (not everyone did), were happy about using Scrum, and delivered good results, ended up progressing/moving into management and lost contact with the day-to-day work.

1. They have an imaginary reality based on what it once was. 2. They don’t accept the evidence. 3. They have incentives to build systems of people to increase their salaries.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#144

Post by j4yav »

onion2k wrote: post #49
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 amount of time lost to doing Scrum things was so out of control that some people had fewer than 3-4 hours per day to actually work. If the aggregate of the sprint planning, backlog refinement, retro and dailies is more than 10% of the total time (eg 1 full day out of a 10 day sprint) for most of the team then something bizarre is going on. If the everyone is losing 50% of their time to agile things then your proc…

It’s funny how every team I have worked on that embraced scrum was impressively broken in the exact same way.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#145

Post by nick__m »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #52
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…

> everyone meeting This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings. Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup) I think it's emblematic of a few things about the founder/cofounder/lead: 1) they are an egomaniac and just needs to see everyone reporting in, 2) they don't…

I work I infrastructure and the daily meeting in the morning is the most important part of our day. It last 15 minutes, first we review and dispatch the active alerts, then we check escalated demands, then we check if someone needs help. We not do to solve issues during that meeting, this is done in smaller groups after the daily. That meeting keeps us aligned.

Also no managers are allowed during our daily meetings. This is something important that enables more candid communication.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#146

Post by Aurornis »

ljm wrote: post #80
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…

> Of course, the Scrum proponents will rush in and tell me that we were doing it wrong I don't think it's helpful in any discussion to try and pre-emptively dismiss people who might disagree. People have been doing that for the decade or so scrum has been mainstream and it just dumbs the discussion down to he-said she-said. That being said, agile as it was originally described in the manifesto was not prescriptive, a…

> I don't think it's helpful in any discussion to try and pre-emptively dismiss people who might disagree.

But that's exactly what the people I'm talking about are doing:

They define scrum as something that works, thereby preemptively dismissing any complaints from situations where it didn't work.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#147

Post by tilwidnk »

bluGill wrote: post #84
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 aut…

Agreed, Scrum is a death march. Kanban is the way.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#148

Post by fatherzine »

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…

"people had fewer than 3-4 hours per day to actually work" had the same experience. the unwritten expectation was to pull 8 hour coding days /plus/ all the Scrum overhead. if you don't like it, there's 1000 guys waiting to take your place, partly thanks to remote. a core reason we haven't fire you yet is that it is costly to ramp up new people, but don't try our patience.

see also "hire fast fire faster"

Re: Scrum Sucks

#149

Post by nottorp »

bluGill wrote: post #84
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 aut…

> despite a very great automated test program we constantly discover a lot of serious bugs in manual test that are difficult to automate

+1 :)

Yes, I could just upvote. But this deserves more emphasis than that.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#150

Post by kevinmchugh »

ajmurmann wrote: post #123
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…

The obvious alternative to scrum for many teams who wish to be agile is something based on kanban.
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