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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.
Surely you're exaggerating about a one hour standup?
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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 l…
With software you have a situation with two problems. First is the "gap" between those doing the work, and those writing the checks. (When it's the same person, this problem disappears.) The guy editing the checks likes to understand progress is being made, and that the project both has an end and will be successfully completed. The second problem is that by it's nature software "never ends" and many (dare I say most…
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Surely you're exaggerating about a one hour standup?
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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).
Can anybody (not PM/leader) give 1 example of a company where they saw scrum being done "correctly"?
crickets
I guess scrum is fine and people just don't know how to do it properly.
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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…
Retros all too often focus on the last thing that happened and risk turning into a complaint session. I've told my team anyone is welcome to ask for a retro whenever for any reason, but we don't make them recurring meetings because there is too much of a temptation to find something wrong to fill the time.
But people seem to love them.
I'd prefer to spend that time putting my head down and grinding through whatever sucky thing people were otherwise whining about.
I think what people really want is not agile, not waterfall, just to do it in a way that feels natural. No framework. Pretty case-by-case. How I imagine Lao Tzu would have it. Roll your eyes but it's true though.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
are 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.
We 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…
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planEarlier 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.
I'm Head of Development in a midsized SaaS company. Another team's PM went for paternity leave and I stepped in to lean in on any needs.
I discovered that the team of 10 people were using close to an hour a day on stand-up. A culture thing, apparently.
I joined he stand-up a few times, slimmed the scope of the conversation to roughly 10-15 minutes.
This worked for all three months of the PM's paternity leave.
PM returns, is pissed over the change and in less than two days, the stand-up is back to almost an hour a day.