Earlier quoted context omitted.
What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?
Story points, velocity, burn down charts, shit like that.
None of those things are part of scrum as described by the actual guide
Why Scrum is stressing you out
41–50 of 462 posts
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#42I've learned to hate software process. If you have team sizes set sanely and empower devs to do what they need to do in order to accomplish the goal, they'll be fine without the management overhead of arbitrarily imposed productivity flow. Agile et al, along with 99% of the features in ticketing systems, exist to make managers feel like they are justifying their paycheck. If you are a manager and this makes you angry…
But what does it mean to "empower devs". Do you give them requirements and say I'll check in on deadline day in 6 months?
Presumably you would still use iterations to track progress, Epics/Features to break down requirements, some kind of estimation to track if you're ahead/behind schedule?
I certainly wouldn't go back to Waterfall days, but I suspect many current devs never experienced that.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#43We don't do agile, scrum, standups, etc. We meet 1x week to review where we're at and establish/re-establish priorities for the week if needed, use a ticket system for tasks to track progress, a high-level "weekly goals" shared doc, communicate on Slack as needed, and let the devs actually do the f'ing work the way they know best. If someone can't self-manage and produce without a manager over them, or reach out if t…
and this is quite easy to automate with AI.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#44This article hit really hard. I’m super stressed with my team’s cadence right now. I often think about what’s pathological in modern-corporate-scaled-agile-abominations and this really hits the nail on the head, but I think for me the main complaint is that if you can only see two weeks into the future, planning can become very difficult.
I also often think of how our scrum process makes me feel like I’m back in grade school doing little busywork projects like coloring a hand-outline turkey or whatever. I really kind of think that’s the point. It’s for people who never escaped the schoolchild mindset. No doubt it works wonderfully well for them. It doesn’t work very well for me.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's hard to imagine. In big tech it's the team manager who decides that standups should happen and when (maybe this is an expectation from higher-ups). He always joins unless running late.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's hard to imagine. In big tech it's the team manager who decides that standups should happen and when (maybe this is an expectation from higher-ups). He always joins unless running late.
Be that as it may, if the scrum guide explicitly says they shouldn't then it isn't really fair to blame scrum for that.
Honestly, the recurring complaints with scrum, agile, etc basically boil down to this: shitty organizations can make any system miserable. People generally are blaming the intermediate cause (how we do scrum sucks) rather than the root cause (our company sucks and nothing would work).
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#47I've learned to hate software process. If you have team sizes set sanely and empower devs to do what they need to do in order to accomplish the goal, they'll be fine without the management overhead of arbitrarily imposed productivity flow. Agile et al, along with 99% of the features in ticketing systems, exist to make managers feel like they are justifying their paycheck. If you are a manager and this makes you angry…
But what does it mean to "empower devs". Do you give them requirements and say I'll check in on deadline day in 6 months? Presumably you would still use iterations to track progress, Epics/Features to break down requirements, some kind of estimation to track if you're ahead/behind schedule? I certainly wouldn't go back to Waterfall days, but I suspect many current devs never experienced that.
as things are ready to be shown you will see them : this is how you will know
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#48are 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.
Even worse. When I worked in that sector, the government simultaneously mandated that we use agile methodologies, and also that we do waterfall things. Doing agilefall like that was the dumbest possible thing, because we got the benefits of neither and the weaknesses of both.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
As a developer, I find retros most useful when EMs (and probably PMs, depends on how things are configured organizationally) aren't present, as it should give a chance to talk freely about challenges you or the team face, which often are organizational in nature and may involve one's management chain. My current role doesn't adhere to this, and it makes retro often really painful.
Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out
#50I’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…
I don't feel anything you've said is logical. The deliverable is, in the best case, what communicates progress and success. Short of that, tickets can do that, which is also not what the article is complaining about. The article also specifically attacks Agile/Scrum; Kanban is different and quite explicitly sidesteps a lot of the stress problems the article outlines.