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Scrum Sucks

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171–180 of 298 posts

Re: Scrum Sucks

#171

Post by zac23or »

Scrum is not the problem. I worked with waterfall, Scrum, Extreme Go Horse, etc.

All the methodologies I was forced to work on basically didn't work, all the methodologies are just a play of “business theater”.

Someone with the power to decide decides to use anything fashionable, now it's Scrum, but it used to be something else. Whoever does well in this theater isn't a good employee, it's whoever does best in the current play.

My defense in the face of all this nonsense is to be professional, because the company will never be. I start work on time, do my work, leave on time. I help in emergencies, but if emergencies become the norm, I change sectors, hours or companies.

I try to avoid meetings. I say “I’m working on something important.” Always works.

I never allow anyone to disrespect me (I know a company with “physical punishments”). If that happens, I'll change companies.

Again, Scrum is not the problem. The next fantastic methodology will fail. It's just a Play, and you need to be an actor, or move to a theater whose play is in pre-production...and enjoy it until the play starts to be performed.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#172

Post by ranit »

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 or that it's not truly Scrum if it's helping more than hurting

Did you worded it like this on purpose, or you wanted to say the opposite? :-)

Re: Scrum Sucks

#173

Post by lapcat »

the_other wrote: post #160
lapcat wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't this just be an email instead?

No. No-one will read it and it slows down "what collaboration do we need to set up today" aspect.

If no one will read it, then maybe it's not important, so you don't need the meeting either? ;-)

Re: Scrum Sucks

#174

Post by danbolt »

I sometimes wonder if agile/scrum’s inefficiency stings so much because of its disconnect with the end product. Or, you end up being involved in a bunch of bureaucratic work as a programmer, even though you can see the codebase’s flaws in plain sight. You can view a peer’s backlog, but also see their concrete work on GitHub. The map truly isn’t the territory.

I haven’t really been wowed at all by LLMs over the past cycle, personally. That said, I wonder if it could truly shine as a tool that could conversationally explain a codebase to management to empower staff and cut down the red tape.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#175

Post by hot_gril »

Any eng project management practice that has its own name sucks. Same goes for programming paradigms. I like my team to be free of this pretentious stuff.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#176

Post by davidham »

olah_1 wrote: post #168

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Sprints only make sense for teams with more than, say, 4 engineers. Because a Sprint is fundamentally about estimating bandwidth. You look at the old Sprints and are able to average out some kind of true estimate of capability, right? But if you have a smaller team, everyone basically already knows what your bandwidth is.

I would say that a sprint is fundamentally about delivering a valuable Increment. Something useful, some kind of meaningful progress. You can start to use past performance as a way to estimate what you'll be able to do in the future, but only with a stable team that has been estimating its own work for a while.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#177

Post by jacobyoder »

lacrimacida wrote: post #44
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 have a similar experience to yours. My organization even hired a scrum expert who is probably just deadweight, he’s on mute in all our meetings for the past 6-8 months. It’s also true about having little actual work time, in my org we spend so much time in meetings that in the end 3-4 hours of actual work are left on a daily basis. I objected to this but was told everyone should learn everything, end of story. We’r…

"everyone should learn everything"

I've been in a couple places where I did know 'everything', or... near enough. The more I got to learn outside my own specific dept, the more cynical and frustrated I became (usually). You start to notice that entire groups of people are often just sitting around for days doing absolutely nothing because they're waiting for one person who's out for the week, etc. Or you learn that people just spent 4 months working on something that was rejected in a meeting 4 months earlier, but... the original team still wanted to do it anyway, and therefore couldn't help your group over the past 4 months.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#178

Post by mparnisari »

> Oh, and say goodbye to pair-programming and collaboration, everyone is too focused earning those juicy story points.

ugh yes this was my biggest gripe when my team used scrum at my last job. Collaboration was thrown out the window.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#180

Post by belval »

_ea1k wrote: post #154
unethical_ban wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! At my old employer they used "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe). About a dozen teams of developers and operations people got together once a QUARTER to determine what big epics/objectives to complete, and then develop stories and estimates (points) for those stories and roughly which sprint they would fall into within the "iteration", as the quarter was called. Every team on the same sprint schedule. Fibbonaci story…

Don't forget to tag and label every story appropriately, use the corporate standard for sprint names, and file those tps reports on time. That would be great.

I feel like that's unfair. It's normal in a company to answer to someone and its normal for that someone to want some way to answer the question "are we on track for X" when asked by their superior (whoever that may be). The larger the company the more that statement becomes true because the number of interconnect for N employees is O(N^2).

That does not excuse making the whole thing stupid and painful, but accountability is not an unreasonable request.

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