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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#261

Post by prepend »

What does “sprints are involuntary” mean?

My team chooses the characteristics of the sprint. It’s not like they are randomly assigned. It’s a collaboration between leadership, team members and non-team stakeholders. It’s not like there’s anything mandatory, so we set our release schedule and what a release means based on what makes sense.

What’s the alternative proposed?

I wonder how the author is working if they think that these things are involuntary. It seems like their environment sucks and it’s expressed through saying scrum sucks. Scrum is so generic it can be adapted for many needs. I’d like to see the author explain why their scrum is so rigid. Does he suck at estimating? Suck at communicating? Lacks resources? Leadership is poor at estimating? Who knows, but it seems like blaming scrum is like blaming software development in general and more of a “this job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers” type screaming into the void.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#262

Post by TN1ck »

jksmith wrote: post #40

Unfortunately, we aren't understanding the intricacies of high-performance. I've worked with maybe 150 scrum teams. 99% were mediocre. Remaining 1% understood energy usage, how to limit what they took into a sprint backlog, and how to manage their capacity. When I asked a manager about a particular team, he said "I don't care if they do fight club in the morning, just let them keep doing what they're doing." To refra…

I wonder if this team could have choosen any framework and it would have worked, they just happened to use scrum. With the founder mode discussions recently there was this saying akin to "a successful process is a result of talented people" and not the other way around. It stuck in my head and I feel this is an instance of that. Although you definitely can force a process on a talented team and have their productivity diminish.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#263

Post by throwaway89988 »

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

What you say works 100% for trivial CRUD applications. Which is also, where SCRUM is still a bad framework, but at least SCRUM works on this trivial level of software development.

When a project is about non trivial projects, people, especially developers can not be easily replaced, because no one can replace a specialist with several years of experience on the spot. What I can archive in one day and what somebody else can archive on a day highly depends on what it is. Write a field to the database? Works. Write a rule engine? I'll probably be a factor of 10x more productive than an average developer. Write some GUI/CSS? A frontend developer is 10x more productive than me.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#264

Post by prepend »

replwoacause wrote: post #257
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.

We use Agile at our company and let me tell you, it sucks. Maybe straight up scrum would be worse, but honestly agile is invasive and just feels like you’re being babysat and forcing people to give BS updates at standups because they’re afraid of sounding unproductive.

I find Agile is like democracy. It does suck, but it’s better than everything else.

What would you prefer besides agile?

I had a conversation with a young devTM who was arguing that estimating is hard and always inaccurate so we shouldn’t estimate. Everyone should just work on things until they are done. He argued this earnestly and didn’t recognize that there are opportunity costs and conflicting priorities and the need to choose what to do. He earnestly argued that every single user story should be worked on in order of entry until it was completed. It would have been precious how clueless this suggestion was if he didn’t spent 20-40 minutes a week arguing this as an explanation for why his items weren’t done and why he was civil disobediencing to refuse to estimate or report time on tasks.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#265

Post by marcosdumay »

roenxi wrote: post #135
lpapez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That similarity is superficial. It is observing that no ideology perfectly survives implementation - which is true, but there is no alternative option so it isn't a useful observation. We don't have any successful countries that use communist ideologies because central planning is destructive and the abolishment of private property is catastrophic. Calling for communism is tantamount to wishing for death and destruct…

The funny thing is that "communism" is a highly overloaded term, with several very precise definitions, one of what is so successful that about every country currently implements and people that dismiss it are ignored and considered radical. (But then, nobody calls that one "communism" nowadays, the the people pushing the others will really hate you if you talk about it.)

While "scrum" is a proper name with a single definition that anybody can look that is absolutely not precise enough for anybody to follow. By definition you can't really do scrum right.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#266

Post by nottorp »

prepend wrote: post #261

What does “sprints are involuntary” mean? My team chooses the characteristics of the sprint. It’s not like they are randomly assigned. It’s a collaboration between leadership, team members and non-team stakeholders. It’s not like there’s anything mandatory, so we set our release schedule and what a release means based on what makes sense. What’s the alternative proposed? I wonder how the author is working if they thi…

> My team chooses the characteristics of the sprint. It’s not like they are randomly assigned. It’s a collaboration between leadership, team members and non-team stakeholders. It’s not like there’s anything mandatory, so we set our release schedule and what a release means based on what makes sense.

But then it's not Scrum. Scrum is weekly.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#267

Post by nottorp »

oneshtein wrote: post #59
erik_seaberg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In big tech it's the team manager who decides that standups should happen and when (maybe this is an expectation from higher-ups). Then it's not a SCRUM process at all. Case solved. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-definition https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum

> Then it's not a SCRUM process at all. Case solved.

Yeah and communism also works in theory :)

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#268

Post by stetrain »

replwoacause wrote: post #257
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.

We use Agile at our company and let me tell you, it sucks. Maybe straight up scrum would be worse, but honestly agile is invasive and just feels like you’re being babysat and forcing people to give BS updates at standups because they’re afraid of sounding unproductive.

There isn't anything here about having to do daily standups:

https://agilemanifesto.org

https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

It's common in corporate implementations of Agile (tm) but it isn't actually some commandment or prescribed feature of Agile itself. It's actually prescribed by Scrum:

https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#269

Post by ako »

skydhash wrote: post #239
ako wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum/Agile is basically an answer for things that went wrong in the past. Building software has a long history of delays, running over time, running out of budgets, etc. As a stakeholder/customer, you need certainties up front: how long is it going to take, what is it going to cost? And if you think this isn't reasonable, just consider, would you hire a contractor to work on your house that can't tell you up front c…

What is required is frank conversation with the stakeholder/customer, because there are so many trade offs decision to make. Devs don’t like to estimate tasks because there’s an exploration phase (which cost time an energy) to have the solution and the cost of time and energy for the implementation. And it’s recursive. Agile was basically saying, let the devs do their thing, but have a conversation every once in a wh…

Agile recognizes that software development is a design process with uncertainties and not a repeated tested manufacturing process (product development versus product manufacturing). With the uncertainty of a design process in mind, and the need for estimates, it suggests comparing similar tasks to get an empirical estimate. But since it's just an estimate, you regularly need to validate that the estimate is still considered correct.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#270

Post by gtirloni »

hawski wrote: post #238
skrebbel wrote: post #231

Back when Scrum was new I already wondered how it could make sense to make developers be constantly sprinting. I mean it's right there in the word choice. You can't sprint all the time! A sprint is short and fast and then you rest. Making everything in work life be only sprints is madness.

You rest at all the meetings.

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