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

201–210 of 462 posts

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#201

Post by bruce511 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #192
bruce511 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Because stress rolls downhill. The stress at the bottom is there by design. If you start meeting the deadlines too reliably, the higher-ups will probably conclude that there are needlessly many people in the team, and will try to remove one and see what happens. Repeat until things start cracking apart.

I guess that depends on your management. I've not experienced that myself, but I'm sure there are places where it happens.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#202

Post by [deleted] »

siva7 wrote: post #131
bamboozled wrote: post #70

What I dislike about SCRUM specifically is that if you're having a rough week at home, recovering from illness or you just have things to do outside of work, you can't really just have an easy week and make up for it later on. It's a kind of constant grind and we always have a way of "filling up" our sprint. If we don't meet our target, it always feels like a fail. I know it shouldn't feel like that but it's human na…

The sprint goal is a team target. If you're sick that shouldn't endanger the sprint goal because anyone in the team can pick up any work. Of course in mediocre or low-performing teams that's almost never the case but still not the fault of a product framework

[deleted]

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#203

Post by n_ary »

lispisok wrote: post #55

One of my favorite moments was when my non-developer friend at a tech company asked me what scrum masters did because she could not figure out what the scrum masters did at her company. I told her the answer which is nothing.

Schedule meetings, move tickets around, moderate meetings, call more meetings, scold misbehaviour during meetings, help management with their stuff(secretary/personal assistant?), scold other teams for not helping out in time, question about stale tasks(tickets), act as coordinator of news/requests/demands from other teams, attend all meetings which involve tickets, coerce/seduce other teams to deliver something early because our team has messed up, promote more scrum agile topics. At least that is what I observed at my work. They indeed do a lot of work but often not well defined.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#204

Post by n_ary »

20240915 wrote: post #133
ranjanprj wrote: post #125

Agile/Scrum and all forms of project management is a scam you should work in layers serving layer above, have wbs and tasks assigned out of it in your layer, justifying urgency by impact on business/users, reward people who accept and close most tasks by appreciation and break. And fire anyone who misbehaves.

Is this satire?

I believe, they are describing real world consequences of scrum/agile and how real management uses it, which might be different from what the manifesto actually hoped.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#205

Post by n_ary »

Aeolun wrote: post #94
015a wrote: post #58

One hill I will utterly die on: Many people (including some in these comments) are fully able and happy to go their entire career mistaking high performing individuals with a high performing work framework.

Because for high performing individuals the framework doesn’t really matter? Most people aren’t high performing, so they’re designed to get the best out of the mediocre ones.

On the contrary, I’d say frameworks can’t set its claws on high performing “politically influential” individuals because they are fairly powerful. In most cases, majority people are high performers but crippled by the frameworks due to power imbalance.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#206

Post by ramblerman »

ath3nd wrote: post #198
roenxi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, I will say that if that is a demonstrable thing It's demonstratable: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/ > and there was no upside I'd go on a sarcastic rant here, but it's hard to stop myself. Don't read further if exaggerations upset you. Sure, there are upsides, but they are hardly benefitting software engineering speed, quality, stability and developer happiness. The biggest ups…

> How can you want a salary increase or question big man POs decisions, when you've just been acting like a kid for the last two weeks?

I think you just provided me with a small epiphany...

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#207

Post by quartesixte »

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.

As someone who works in a hard-tech startup, where daily standups in production manufacturing teams are part of the daily culture.

1) Anything longer than 15 minutes is insane 2) What do you even talk about for an hour? 3) Why do you even do standups for design work? What "blockers" could you possibly have that require daily, 15 minute tagups with the entire crew?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#208

Post by [deleted] »

vannevar wrote: post #165

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 extre…

[deleted]

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#209

Post by carlmr »

ath3nd wrote: post #198
roenxi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, I will say that if that is a demonstrable thing It's demonstratable: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/ > and there was no upside I'd go on a sarcastic rant here, but it's hard to stop myself. Don't read further if exaggerations upset you. Sure, there are upsides, but they are hardly benefitting software engineering speed, quality, stability and developer happiness. The biggest ups…

>two parental figures (the PO and Scrum master)

Another great point. The overhead is insane. 2 people that don't directly contribute work output per team.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#210

Post by meheleventyone »

n_ary wrote: post #203
lispisok wrote: post #55

One of my favorite moments was when my non-developer friend at a tech company asked me what scrum masters did because she could not figure out what the scrum masters did at her company. I told her the answer which is nothing.

Schedule meetings, move tickets around, moderate meetings, call more meetings, scold misbehaviour during meetings, help management with their stuff(secretary/personal assistant?), scold other teams for not helping out in time, question about stale tasks(tickets), act as coordinator of news/requests/demands from other teams, attend all meetings which involve tickets, coerce/seduce other teams to deliver something earl…

Scrum Master is a terrible name though, in games we call this role a Producer but I agree they do a lot of often unseen and very useful work.
Post reply on HN