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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#31

Post by twunde »

LeFantome wrote: post #18
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

Earlier 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?

Daily stand-ups, the main benefit of which is that managers (EMs/PMs) get daily updates on status. Sprints themselves which promise that a certain amount of work will always get done, without any free time being wasted.

A lot of the ceremonies in general are mostly helpful to the EM/PM. How many things that you're doing are actually improving how you get work done? Especially when you consider how much time is spent on these ceremonies (sprint planning 1 hr, sprint retro 1 hour, daily standup 15-30 minutes. Plus whatever prep is needed and the interruption time.) For many companies this is a 20% or more overhead that's mainly busywork because you still need the additional meetings to understand what you're working on.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#32

Post by jghn »

wsc981 wrote: post #28
LeFantome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been a dev, and I've been an EM.

The only thing on that list I've ever liked is the velocity charts. And the only reason I liked them is that it helped me give a slightly less made up date to my own bosses to explain when something might ship.

Over the years I've found that devs have been the one who like retros. Or at least a certain subset of them. When I've been an EM I would try to get rid of them, only to have them requested by my teams. Who knew.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#33

Post by foobarchu »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #16
iaaan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle QA and automated testing?

Be like Microsoft. Fire all your QA. QA is now done by developers and end users. If a multibillion dollar corporation can do this, so can you!

Honestly that would be better than what I have now. Bad QA who you have to tell exactly what to do is infinitely worse than just doing it yourself.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#34

Post by 1over137 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #25
userbinator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Planes fall from the sky far less than, say, some agile/scrum-based web app shitting itself constantly, which happens all the time. Maybe waterfall has its place.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#35

Post by ChicagoDave »

I’ve been building software applications for 40 years. No matter how you slice up the work, we all have to demonstrate progress and goal achievement.

Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Method 1, or whatever are all meant to measure success.

In a lot of cases there is a client or a customer that requires regular progress reports. Management uses reports to measure team performance.

I’m not sure what planet the OP is from, but this will never change. If you have a small team with a simple codebase, kanban is probably sufficient. In larger teams or complex solutions, the reporting just needs to happen.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#36

Post by gedy »

twunde wrote: post #31
LeFantome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?

Daily stand-ups, the main benefit of which is that managers (EMs/PMs) get daily updates on status. Sprints themselves which promise that a certain amount of work will always get done, without any free time being wasted. A lot of the ceremonies in general are mostly helpful to the EM/PM. How many things that you're doing are actually improving how you get work done? Especially when you consider how much time is spent…

This may sound like a no true Scotsman argument, when our company was trained by one of the scrum founders about 18 years ago, they were very clear that the daily standup was only for the team members, and the scrum master. (The scrum master could be a team member, and rotate btw). Managers were not allowed or invited to these. The only thing product managers and engineering managers would participate in and give feedback was in Sprint demos, and the beginning of planning meetings to answer any questions on upcoming stories.

At the time it was incredibly freeing and fixed a pretty awful and behind waterfall project. I was (briefly) at a startup a couple years ago that said they "did Scrum" and what a clusterfuck that was - all the managers meeting daily with devs to see if they were behind and scold them if they were. See ya.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#38

Post by Jtsummers »

1over137 wrote: post #34
Jtsummers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Planes fall from the sky far less than, say, some agile/scrum-based web app shitting itself constantly, which happens all the time. Maybe waterfall has its place.

Eh. Waterfall adds risk to iterative approaches, not value. Wait 3 years to do integration testing because that’s what the schedule says. The smart projects get better quality and use iterative models.

Additionally, there are other iterative models than Scrum. That's pretty much the worst one out there and its only value is to inexperienced teams needing training wheels or overbearing management that doesn't trust the team.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#39

Post by wild_egg »

twunde wrote: post #31
LeFantome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?

Daily stand-ups, the main benefit of which is that managers (EMs/PMs) get daily updates on status. Sprints themselves which promise that a certain amount of work will always get done, without any free time being wasted. A lot of the ceremonies in general are mostly helpful to the EM/PM. How many things that you're doing are actually improving how you get work done? Especially when you consider how much time is spent…

> Daily stand-ups, the main benefit of which is that managers (EMs/PMs) get daily updates on status.

The scrum guide fairly explicitly states that managers should not attend or be part of stand-ups unless they're actively involved in the work as part of the development team.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#40

Post by jksmith »

Unfortunately, we aren't understanding the intricacies of high-performance. I've worked with maybe 150 scrum teams. 99% were mediocre. Remaining 1% understood energy usage, how to limit what they took into a sprint backlog, and how to manage their capacity.

When I asked a manager about a particular team, he said "I don't care if they do fight club in the morning, just let them keep doing what they're doing." To reframe, high-performing scrum teams are actually anti-legacy management, they get more done, are happy (low energy state) and stakeholders were satisfied. So their rolling sprint goal was taking a half day each month and going to Top Golf . The key is, everybody on the team was a scrum sme, and understood how to work the process as a team to reinforce certainty and stability. They also didn't need a scrum master.

I've got lots of anecdotes from this couple of teams, what kind of work their managers actually did, and the sneaky ways they made the process work for them. There's a lot more to scrum than a certification. Just the teams approach to sprint planning was in a whole different class from what mediocre teams normally did.

As for the other 99% of teams, they were mostly management tools. Scrum had been co-opted, especially in orgs using the SAFe framework. This has been at F250's in my experience btw.

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