Why Scrum is stressing you out • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#241

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:02 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #230

LeFantome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?

Burn down charts, team velocity, and story points. They all exist to give software development the illusion of predictability, but saying that a project should take “x sprints” is just setting a deadline with extra steps.

There is nothing wrong with burndown charts but story points and team velocity are poison.

The way you get good at estimating is looking at your database of experience. “I did a task similar to this in 8 days”. Calendar time is real and punchclock time is real, either can be measured. Story points are not real and not measurable and they leave you lost at sea thinking that estimation is impossible, a scam, etc.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#242

Post by skydhash » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:06 PM UTC

Double_a_92 wrote: post #211

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.

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 unnecessar…

They’re not unreasonable in themselves. What sucks is the process around them, because it impedes progress. Why because each tasks varies, and often it morphs while you’re working on it. So whenever a metric is fixed or something interrupts you repeatedly, it just sucks.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#243

Post by dartos » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

Kind of off topic, but when articles have a “conclusion” section nowadays it just screams chatgpt to me, even if chatgpt wasn’t involved at all.

I wonder what the tech blog meta will shape up to be in a couple years.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#244

Post by randomdata » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #221

LeFantome wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?

Without a lot of the project reports, the manager would honestly just have no idea what's going on. I recently moved into management, and one of the challenges I'm trying to balance is how to be aware of my team's progress without wasting their time or being a bottleneck for them. It's a legitimate problem which is often tackled poorly.

At least in the case of software development, which seems to be what Scrum is targeted at, you get the project reports for free by way of the commit log.

That said, the 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto offers another solution: Get rid of management entirely. It states that developers are best to work with the rest of the business collaboratively. Which is the irony of Scrum claiming to be Agile: Only management wants to use it, defying Agile to its fundamental core.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#245

Post by whiteboardr » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

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…

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.

From experience i haven’t come across any “agile” organization that runs true to the manifesto.

There’s been plenty of discussions why the “what could have been” got buried in certain people jumping in, creating weird layers and interpretations of some process for their own profit and ego.

Chinese whispers then lost in translation.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#246

Post by whaleofatw2022 » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #243

Kind of off topic, but when articles have a “conclusion” section nowadays it just screams chatgpt to me, even if chatgpt wasn’t involved at all. I wonder what the tech blog meta will shape up to be in a couple years.

It's getting bad. I'm even seeing what I'd almost certainly ai writeups for language releases and it's so ugly.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#247

Post by skydhash » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

vannevar wrote: post #199

uldos wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume that its devs who are slacking in waterfall? Devs enjoy deving, usually there are either discoveries during execution or change of mind of client or pms figure out that their guestimation for year ahead was not exact. Surprise, surprise and who is going to have crunch time? Devs of course.

I didn't say they were slacking, but they may be working on the wrong things, or prematurely optimizing things at the expense of other priorities. Ironically, it's the author who suggests implicitly that devs can slack more in waterfall ("Sprints never stop"). Since the client is involved in every sprint, any change of mind they have during the development process (and keep in mind that changes of mind are a virtual…

It’s that culture of fear that I don’t understand: devs working on the wrong thing. More often than not, it usually means: Is the dev spending more time than me (who is not doing the work) is willing to give him? Every professional understands priority and expectations. And communication is all that is required. But PM usually don’t understand the nature of software development and fear of losing control (the bad ones). The good ones just let people work after they made it clear what should be worked on.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#248

Post by osigurdson » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:30 PM UTC

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…

I don't like long daily meetings, but there is essentially no value in the YTNB meeting either ("yesterday, today, no blockers") meeting either.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#249

Post by _heimdall » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

whiteboardr wrote: post #245

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.

From experience i haven’t come across any “agile” organization that runs true to the manifesto. There’s been plenty of discussions why the “what could have been” got buried in certain people jumping in, creating weird layers and interpretations of some process for their own profit and ego. Chinese whispers then lost in translation.

I worked at a small startup that actually handled that distinction well for a while.

We did 2 week sprints, but that really was more to keep a remote team regularly in touch and updated. Sprint work was very much up to each dev, and at the end of the sprint anything that changed or slipped was just chalked up to lessons for future work.

That did change eventually, both as the team grew a bit more and funding started to run low. Eventually we had the worst of both worlds mentioned in the article, sprints with more rigid goals leading to a quarterly goal driven more by marketing goals than anything else. Throw in the fact that the still rather small company ended up with one person making product, marketing, and even technical decisions and we devolved into glorified code monkeys pretty quickly.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#250

Post by _heimdall » Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

LeFantome wrote: post #18

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.

What in Scrum is about keeping managers happy?

I don't know if this is properly part of scrum, but it is how I've seen it implemented on every team I've been on where scrum was implemented.

Sprints end with some kind of demo, retrospective, and sprint planning designed almost entirely to keep PMs and managers in the loop and happy. Reports are generated, spreadsheets with a few quarters worth of tasks are updated, and PMs or managers get to run that further up the chain, presumably to make it clear that great progress is being made under their supervision and well run scrum methodology.