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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#81

Post by Aeolun »

wild_egg wrote: post #39
twunde wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers.

They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#82

Post by Aeolun »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #46
erik_seaberg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We blame scrum because the framework provided makes it a lot easier for life to be miserable.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#83

Post by cvoss »

gridspy wrote: post #62
benfortuna wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- One on Ones to discuss roadblocks and thoughts every week. - Issue tracking as a common place to describe what needs to be done and thoughts / details on how it is solved. Something lightweight like Trello is ideal - A Kanban board so people have an organised way to pick up new issues when low on work - A weekly showoff meeting where there are few 5 minute presentations and a 30 minute "I did something really cool…

This is basically how my team does it. I love it. My manager spends much of her time figuring out how to help remove our roadblocks and planning the 6 month to 1 year horizon (with our input). I lead the weekly meeting where we do the showing off, PSAs, or light brainstorming on issues with broad relevance.

Two scheduled meetings per week = tons of dev time and freedom to explore / innovate! (Ok, three weekly meetings if you count the product-wide meeting, which is usually a waste of N-5 people's time, and I usually have it on the background while I continue working.)

We are remote, so ideally there's also one in person gathering per year to do the big vision casting and major high level brainstorming.

We still have room to improve, especially in the area of ad-hoc dev-dev communication. Always interested to hear how others do it!

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Aeolun wrote: post #81
wild_egg wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long.

[deleted]

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#86

Post by bruce511 »

gridspy wrote: post #65
ChicagoDave wrote: post #35

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…

The post is fundamentally about all the performance of making stories, assigning points, allocating work and doing standups all the time. None of that is required to actually create software. If people are judgemental around what stories are left uncompleted or points / week then the situation can become stressful for no benefit to anyone.

>> None of that is required to actually create software.

Agreed. (Assuming you mean "create" as in write, as distinct from create as in get funded.)

>> If people are judgemental around what stories are left uncompleted or points / week then the situation can become stressful for no benefit to anyone.

Clearly no stress is better. But these things create stress in the other direction too. Slower than expected progress, the existence of "intractable problems", work going unfinished creates significant stress up the ladder.

In a perfect world the dev team is given a perfect spec, and a reasonable time to do it in, and after being "left alone" they deliver the finished product on time.

Given that that world doesn't exist, given that the "money we're spending" may turn out to be completely wasted (because the spec was wrong, or because the problem us much harder than anticipated), the ideal case seems unlikely to happen.

I say this not as a defense of crappy management processes, or even less as a defense of crappy managers, but rather in the spirit that understanding the problem goes a long way to solving it.

And yes, many places have bad processes and bad middle managers. I don't envy you that. But finding a way to better solve the manager's problem typically improves the relationship.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#87

Post by Aeolun »

benfortuna wrote: post #42
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #3

I'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.

You can have a two week cadence without connecting tasks to sprints.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#88

Post by irrational »

I refuse to stress about it. If I don’t get the things done in the time allotted by the points, oh well. If I don’t get them done by the end of the sprint, oh well. And, while my manager might bring it up in one-on-ones, I’ve never seen any consequences from not stressing about trying to meet artificial deadlines.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#89

Post by Arainach »

foolinaround wrote: post #10

are there places today that don't do some variation of scrum today? Waterfall is pretty much non-existent.

There are plenty. All you need is a competent team that trusts each others.

I work for a huge corporation. My team plans and commits to quarterly OKRs and has a team meeting once a week to check in on how folks are doing. There are no sprints and no 2-week deadlines. Once a month or so we update the progress scoring on the OKRs.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#90

Post by Aeolun »

bruce511 wrote: post #86
gridspy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post is fundamentally about all the performance of making stories, assigning points, allocating work and doing standups all the time. None of that is required to actually create software. If people are judgemental around what stories are left uncompleted or points / week then the situation can become stressful for no benefit to anyone.

>> None of that is required to actually create software. Agreed. (Assuming you mean "create" as in write, as distinct from create as in get funded.) >> If people are judgemental around what stories are left uncompleted or points / week then the situation can become stressful for no benefit to anyone. Clearly no stress is better. But these things create stress in the other direction too. Slower than expected progress,…

> Agreed. (Assuming you mean "create" as in write, as distinct from create as in get funded.)

You are essentially saying “Shit is bad, give up on it ever improving.”

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