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Scrum Sucks

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181–190 of 298 posts

Re: Scrum Sucks

#181

Post by ineptech »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #165
ineptech wrote: post #155

Two thoughts: > "Way of work should be defined at a team level by its people, not by the company." OP delivers that like a surprise, but isn't that the single core defining tenet of Agile? I thought it was. > Sprint Planning — as simple as it seems, a long session (up to 4 hours).. My big insight is, painful sprint planning is a result of painful deploys. Once you accomplish real CICD, you can just dispense with spri…

I think one of the biggest mistakes of Scrum is the Sprint concept. Artificially carving work into an X-week, immutable window makes no sense. Plan releases for when feature sets reach the level of maturity users and product folks want them. The Sprint approach leads to half-assed features hiding behind a small army of feature flags. At a minimum, if you can’t get rid of sprints, at least change the default 2 weeks i…

Sprints make/made sense in the world of slow deploy cycles, especially for lengthy manual regression testing. If it takes you three weeks to get from a story being done to a story being in production, deciding which sprint a thing goes in is the difference between customers getting it on day n or day n+21. Once that's not a problem you can kind of forget sprints exist.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#182

Post by npteljes »

Bad management will turn any methodology into a bad experience. I also think scrum, and especially its implementations that I have been subjected to, could use improvement.

I dislike the artificial time-constraints of the sprint, and the PI in SAFe. In my world, I wouldn't concern engineers with deadlines, but rather I'd have them work continuously, like in kanban. I think it eliminates overhead, and if velocity, and other such metrics are desired, management can conjure numbers out of thin air, just as they always did.

Without sprints, there would be no need for planning either, but I'd hold refinement meetings regularly. What I'd do is break down the work into tasks and create a dependency structure, like the Critical Path Method in project management.

I'd estimate in person-days, and that person would be a hypothetical normal teammate. Like, the best guy would do it in half that time, and a junior would take twice, even with hand-holding.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#183

Post by a_square_peg »

nine_k wrote: post #140
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…

Re-reading http://agilemanifesto.org/ (which is ridiculously short) and comparing it to an "agile practice" around you is very eye-opening. Some companies actually practice agile development, and it works. They are small, nimble, and have very little process. But then they grow...

Wonder how 'Sprint', 'Scrum', 'Kanban' etc. all evolved out this? I really can't understand how it went from 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools' became formalized processes of daily standups, 2-week sprints, etc.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#184

Post by hot_gril »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #16

Aside: We need an alternate viewing filter for medium like how nitter is to X. Every time I open a medium hosted link it is just unbearable. Edit: The firefox reader view (F9) works very well at getting rid of Medium nonsense and making it clean.

This article looks basically the same in FF reader view as the original, except for a banner that appears at the bottom in a private window that some cookie must've remembered I closed long ago. What am I missing?

Re: Scrum Sucks

#185

Post by BeetleB »

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…

Can't speak to your company, but in my experience all Scrum (done well) is doing is making the overhead explicit and easy to quantify (as you yourself were able to do). Eliminating Scrum doesn't mean you'll save that time and overhead. It will simply be hidden.

Of course, that's with Scrum done well. If you're having 30 minute daily meetings, you have a point.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#186

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

comebhack wrote: post #169
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #16

Aside: We need an alternate viewing filter for medium like how nitter is to X. Every time I open a medium hosted link it is just unbearable. Edit: The firefox reader view (F9) works very well at getting rid of Medium nonsense and making it clean.

Firefox reader is good, there's also scribe.rip which is like nitter for X. E.g. https://scribe.rip/scrum-sucks-9960011fc5cf

Oh thank you thank you. This is so much better.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#187

Post by [deleted] »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #150
ajmurmann wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Scrum Sucks

#188

Post by tootie »

I get really tired of seeing this once a month. OP had a bad experience with Scrum. Lots of people have. I've seen it be incredibly effective. I generally prefer Kanban, the principles are mostly the same. In my experience, the effectiveness really boils down to team maturity. The crux of the process revolves around writing user stories that define an increment of user value and executing on each story past all defined quality gates in strict priority order. It does not and really cannot make a team actually operate faster, only deliver increments with observable velocity. In practice, most teams will end up going slower, but delivering more accurately and reducing rework or unmet expectations.

At best, Scrum or Kanban with a tool like JIRA are really there to establish a shared vernacular and facilitate clear communication and manage expectations. And if done properly, they are incredibly effective.

My biggest problem with Scrum in particular is really the word "Sprint". It implies we're all rushing to a goal and that's really never the cast. Literally just rename your 2-week iteration as a "Slog" and change nothing else and see how people react.

Where the process typically breaks down is being unclear about priorities, working on too many things at once, skipping quality gates, defining tasks instead of features or trying to estimate an entire product backlog at once and setting a deadline that is utterly doomed to fail.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#189

Post by mondocat »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #59

It's interesting to speculate on why, if Scrum is so bad, everyone uses it? Is it because everyone is an idiot (e.g. management)? Or for some nefarious reason? Or maybe it isn't actually that bad? On one project I was on, there was a contractor company billing millions per year to create a React admin tool frontend. Many developers involved, Scrum master full-time, and so on. Tickets were created for small parts of f…

Because it purports to make progress predictable, and measurable, which for the PMs and managers is very important.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#190

Post by jordanmorgan10 »

I have never, ever worked at a company where I e joyed any form of agile or scrum. All it did was kill my joy, add more meetings and complicate even the simplest things. I honestly wish it would just go away.
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