I'm at a weird point in my career where every development process stresses me out, no matter what. Guess that's burnout.
Why Scrum is stressing you out
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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#22are there places today that don't do some variation of scrum today? Waterfall is pretty much non-existent.
some places are cheating and doing design sprints and eventually implementation sprints. better than doing mythical pure implementation.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#23> The business side just can’t help itself. ("We have to market things!" "We need to inform customers about what's coming!" "We have to make promises at conventions!" "That's just the reality!")
Then shortly after:
> Treat [developers] as respected peers, not replaceable cogs in a machine.
Yes, it’s hard to know understand the (oft-maligned) “Business Side” doesn’t bow and genuflect when they enter a room full of programmers.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#24I think back to the early 2000's, and there are other factors in play as well. Back then, I worked with a team of engineers that stayed together for over 4 years. In that time, we did not have Project Managers telling us to do daily standups. We met as an engineering team. We often would go days without having a formal meeting. But, software was different then as well. Everything is interconnected now. One team dropp…
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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#25are there places today that don't do some variation of scrum today? Waterfall is pretty much non-existent.
From what I've heard, aerospace and automotive are still largely using waterfall.
Yes. And it doesn’t work very well. Lots of late deliveries or reduced project scopes (often still late and over budget, but mot as bad).
Increasingly, iterative models are used and those are much better. For some reason since it isn’t Scrum people still insist they do Waterfall even though they do nothing like it.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just keep in mind that a lot of people equate Agile with Scrum, which is incorrect. Agile is about exactly what you said: empowering devs to get shit done. None of the extra “keep managers happy” crap that Scrum introduces is in any way covered by the Agile manifesto.
What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?
Story points, velocity, burn down charts, shit like that.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#27I think back to the early 2000's, and there are other factors in play as well. Back then, I worked with a team of engineers that stayed together for over 4 years. In that time, we did not have Project Managers telling us to do daily standups. We met as an engineering team. We often would go days without having a formal meeting. But, software was different then as well. Everything is interconnected now. One team dropp…
Well you are a manager, can you at least change how things are done for your team?
ex manager here. managers are in an even worse wheel. biz demands managers show up to even _dumber_, less organized meetings than devs think they have to deal with. eng to eng meetings tend to be fine, but the rest of company culture at BigCorp weren’t trained in structured problem solving. it’s negotiating with goldfish half of the time (generally friendly goldfish), and no one actually practices any formalisms or larger cohesive pjm. “just give me a gantt” like the author says would be an absolutely monumental improvement from how i see things get done
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just keep in mind that a lot of people equate Agile with Scrum, which is incorrect. Agile is about exactly what you said: empowering devs to get shit done. None of the extra “keep managers happy” crap that Scrum introduces is in any way covered by the Agile manifesto.
What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?
Some things that come to mind:
- burn-down / velocity charts
- retrospectives
- poker sessions
- daily stand-ups
- user stories and related tickets (eg in JIRA)
There’s probably more ...
Perhaps these things are not necessarily meant to make managers happy, though managers do seem to like this stuff.
As a dev, I prefer a more fluid approach without all the rituals. In the start-up I joined a couple of months ago, we don’t deal with any of the above shit. Which of course is sure to change as the company grows, as that seems to happen often.
Our current way of working (remote company, 4 people):
- 2 calls a week, which tend to last about an hour.
- We discuss work for upcoming week or future stuff.
- We try to deliver every week on whatever was agreed upon at start of week.
Actually, previous company I worked at, was a bit bigger (35 people), but also very little rituals, at least for devs. There was a support department that did the JIRA related stuff. And we had like 2 day-long meetings every year to discuss personal goals/work for next half year. But afterwards just a short weekly meeting for team (sometimes lasting only 10 minutes), no stand-ups and such.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#29are there places today that don't do some variation of scrum today? Waterfall is pretty much non-existent.
We don't do scrum. We release major versions once a month, and bugfixes daily. New features go into the next major version when done, bugfixes gets released as soon as they're done.
We use Kanban boards to get an overview and prioritize work. Apart from that devs mostly manage their own work.
We're a small shop though, perhaps that's why it works well.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#30nobody has ever done "waterfall", it's a strawman created to explain why traditional project management doesn't work in software development. The fact that the article starts with "in the good old days of waterfall" takes away every expectation that I'll read anything intelligent in the article, I believe this post doesn't deserve your time and definitely doesn't deserve mine.