Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 462 posts

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#161

Post by relaxing »

jksmith wrote: post #53
wsc981 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

Good points, and eye-rolling stuff for teams thaqt don't understand the intricacies. For instance: - burn-down / velocity charts: Teams use this at standups to make sure their sprint isn't drifting. That's why a burn-down should be tracked in hours and not points. With points, the data isn't actionable in a reasonable amount of time. The the team sees a problem, they might make use of a pre-determined emergency proce…

> That's why a burn-down should be tracked in hours and not points. With points, the data isn't actionable in a reasonable amount of time.

I don’t follow this?

The arguments against estimates in hours are well known as this point.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#162

Post by relaxing »

gklitz wrote: post #141
Aeolun wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m confused. That is literally all sprints are a regular cadence that tasks and events are connected to?

I think the key is you don’t force/pressure tasks to be completed in sprints.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#163

Post by jrs235 »

2-3-7-43-1807 wrote: post #159
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.

1) scrum is even more democratized than agile 2) no matter what "agile" was supposed to mean - managers anyway interpret it as devs having to be very agile for them all the time ...

And by "devs having to be agile" you mean "devs having to be interruptible during managers hours and flexible in doing their work after all the bs office hours are over".

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#164

Post by roenxi »

carlmr wrote: post #156
roenxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company isn't optimising for fastest development speed. They typically optimise for low variance, consistent value in support of existing processes. Interestingly, if you want highest value then for software it is best to use a high-variance strategy. But that is never going to come out of a company large enough to need professional management because it is pointless to manage large numbers of people to a high va…

>scrum elevates them from total failure to unproductive but fumbling in a good direction. Where's the evidence for this? I kind of agree on big corporate not being able to achieve great development speed. But they had a system before scrum, and I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed.

The evidence is in the company choosing scrum then sticking with it. They believe it helped.

> I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed.

It is too hard to argue from vague anecdotes, so I am resisting the urge to try. However, I will say that if that is a demonstrable thing and there was no upside then it would be surprising that scrum sticks as well as it does.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#165

Post by vannevar »

There are several flaws in this article's arguments, but the central one is easily revealed when you ask this question: why is there a big spike in stress for the "waterfall" project?

The answer is that as the deadline nears, the team realizes that they have not made enough progress to meet the deadline. They must work longer hours, start cutting corners, and toss out features at the last minute. All of this is extremely stressful. It's also a cascading problem on bigger projects where this team's product is a subsystem that subsequently has to be integrated into a bigger platform, because they may have broken compatibility at the last minute to make their deadline.

Contrast this with scrum, where the team collaboratively sets goals on a regular basis and regularly monitors the work remaining and the rate at which they are progressing, so that they know early whether they need to start making trade-offs or adding people to the team. As the author notes, this trades peaks of extreme stress for a predictable (and manageable) medium level of stress. But it also ensures a more consistent and panic-free delivery process.

The problem of burnout is a separate issue. Neither scrum nor waterfall offers a solution to burnout---that is up to the team's management. Nothing in scrum prevents a team from taking breaks from sprints, either as a team or individually.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#166

Post by relaxing »

bruce511 wrote: post #95
Aeolun wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.”

Not at all. Quite the opposite. To improve the situation you first need to understand it. It seems to me that most devs don't understand the root problem, so they both don't understand, and don't constructively improve the current solution. Improvement is not "leave me alone". Improvement is finding efficient ways to remove stress from higher-ups. Because stress rolls downhill.

> Improvement is finding efficient ways to remove stress from higher-ups.

How about gym memberships and mindfulness exercises?

Is the rise of Agile tied to the demise of the three-martini lunch?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#167

Post by vannevar »

lpapez wrote: post #120
Aeolun wrote: post #81

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.

> It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. This, this, this and a thousand times this. It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong". It's like when discussing communism with some diehard fans - when you point out the flaws, the response is…

>It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong".

Yeah, that would be the correct response. If we were discussing communism, and you started complaining that under communism everyone has to stand on one leg and hop up and down, a communist would correctly point out that hopping on one leg is not communism.

>Well to both of those camps I say: if most attempts ended up implementing it "incorrectly" in the end, it's not a very useful framework to begin with then, is it?

This is like saying that exercise isn't useful because most people who attempt it don't stick with it. Doing actual scrum is hard (particularly for managers), so a lot of teams can't stick with it. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#168

Post by wild_egg »

lpapez wrote: post #120
Aeolun wrote: post #81

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.

> It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. This, this, this and a thousand times this. It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong". It's like when discussing communism with some diehard fans - when you point out the flaws, the response is…

> It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong".

Scrum is a victim of semantic drift. The vast majority of people "doing scrum" have never read the guide and are just doing things that other people have told them is Scrum.

It's not Scrum's fault that people have hijacked its name for something completely different. It happens often.

What people call Scrum isn't really Scrum. What people call REST isn't really REST. What people call DevOps isn't really DevOps.

People using the wrong word for something doesn't mean the original definition of the word is invalid.

It's fairly different from the Communism situation in that people discussing Communism are generally talking about the same concepts and the debate is whether or not they're feasible. With the other terms I used above, people are using the same words to talk about completely different concepts with different definitions.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#169

Post by gloryjulio »

repox wrote: post #110
Aeolun wrote: post #81

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.

> 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…

That's the issue where the PM has so much power. In our company the engineering team dictates their process. They can do however they like as long as they ship the products on time.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#170

Post by carlmr »

roenxi wrote: post #164
carlmr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>scrum elevates them from total failure to unproductive but fumbling in a good direction. Where's the evidence for this? I kind of agree on big corporate not being able to achieve great development speed. But they had a system before scrum, and I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed.

The evidence is in the company choosing scrum then sticking with it. They believe it helped. > I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed. It is too hard to argue from vague anecdotes, so I am resisting the urge to try. However, I will say that if that is a demonstrable thing and there was no upside then it would be surp…

>scrum then sticking with it. They believe it helped.

Not necessarily. It's well known that there are many psychological biases in favor of keeping the status quo. Whether it's the sunk cost fallacy, the escalation of commitment or the endowment effect.

Humans tend to stick with bad decisions way longer than rational.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment#/sear...

I think the problem here is we've had a huge trend in switching to scrum, but then people stick with failed scrum because it's the new status quo. Switching back to waterfall can't be sold by consultants. Even if it would help.

Post reply on HN