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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#211

Post by Double_a_92 »

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.

Stories = Requirements Engineering

Assigning Points = Roughly estimating how long it takes you to implement it

Allocating Work = Well... allocating work

Standups = Talking with your colleagues about the current work and clearing problems

Reviews = Showing your results

None of that seems unreasonable. The only thing that kinda sucks are the rigid sprints, because they just cause artificial stress by setting unnecessary deadlines.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#212

Post by Biganon »

semede wrote: post #78
booleandilemma wrote: post #20

We have a woman at my company whose job is to update Jira ticket statuses. Instead of allowing the developers to update the statuses themselves, she will often prematurely update statuses from "In Development" to "Ready for QA" before any code is merged. Or she'll update a ticket that isn't yet being worked on to "In Development". It repeatedly causes a lot of confusion. I think she feels the need to be so hands on w…

That job definitely shouldn't exist. I'm not seeing where the gender of the person added much value to the story tho

Would you have said anything if the comment said "there's a guy" ?...

"There's a person" sounds weirdly mysterious

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#213

Post by northzen »

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…

But ones you are in company which does it right you start appreciate all good things it brings.

I haven't seen working communism though and never heard about it.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#214

Post by yqtjnvou »

Scrum is useless.

it's just another method of demanding results. Where there isn't anything to tell, you shouldn't be forced to do so. All this imbecility does is to create competition, and weed out the ones that don't comply.

I've worked in teams where we were forced to have something to report even when nothing was to report. This made the team create "things" to match their daily scrums, because the truth might get you fired..

Those that actually do work, have nothing to say in these scrums. It's a fact.

Intellectual work is never measured.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#215

Post by fernandotakai »

nineteen999 wrote: post #118

Daily standups are horrendous. I don't know how people put up with that level of time wastage and micromanagement.

the "daily" part is what kills me, specially because saying "no updates" feels super bad, like you are slacking-off.

i would be totally fine with twice a week (mondays so we can sync up and see what's being done throughout the week) and maybe fridays.

as a tech lead that has to lead standups daily, it's frustrating.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#216

Post by Kalanos »

Normalize 3 week sprints. Enables the team to do what they need to do. Less planning overhead. Enables the product manager to be more forward-looking and spend more time focused on customers/ market research.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#217

Post by Clubber »

moribvndvs wrote: post #91
maximumgeek wrote: post #9

I think back to the early 2000's, and there are other factors in play as well. Back then, I worked with a team of engineers that stayed together for over 4 years. In that time, we did not have Project Managers telling us to do daily standups. We met as an engineering team. We often would go days without having a formal meeting. But, software was different then as well. Everything is interconnected now. One team dropp…

In the nearly 30 years of doing this, I’ve had more success delivering good quality software that meets business requirements under waterfall than any of the SCRUM implementations I’ve worked with, and I am saying that without disagreeing that waterfall has its problems. In the agile space, kanban is the only one I’ve felt is productive, but it has trouble scaling to multiple teams.

In my experience, waterfall forces business to think more about the project and plan accordingly. They have to think about how this feature interacts with this other feature. Business also usually has a better understanding of how the software will work because of the planning phase.

In my experience, with 2 week sprints, the business doesn't really have to think about anything outside of bite sized chunks or even how those bite sized chunks affect later bite sized chunks. They can make a snap decision without thinking about it because it can be rectified in the next sprint. Almost no-one has a "big picture," view of the software.

Before agile, we essentially did 4 releases a month (this was back on the burn a CD days), 2 major releases and 2 minor patch releases. It worked really well and we didn't get the burnout as much by sprinting a marathon. With sprints, I always feel burned out. No sense of accomplishment, no letup, working hard just gets you more work. It's like laying bricks one at a time on a wall with unlimited length.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#218

Post by mrits »

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…

The reality is even good devs tend to work hard on the wrong thing. Accountability comes from your peers as much as your manager. If this makes you angry you are one of the bad ones.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#219

Post by LaGrange »

gedy wrote: post #36
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…

This may sound like a no true Scotsman argument, when our company was trained by one of the scrum founders about 18 years ago, they were very clear that the daily standup was only for the team members, and the scrum master. (The scrum master could be a team member, and rotate btw). Managers were not allowed or invited to these. The only thing product managers and engineering managers would participate in and give fee…

Your scrum master is management. It’s just a renamed PM.

I can run a very near standup when allowed to. I also think it’s a waste of time. Just send weekly updates to a group email, or something.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#220

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

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

This doesn't apply for pod-based systems though, does it? They were everywhere for years there and are still very common. Basically by definition there's only one or two people that can do each task.
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