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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#271

Post by teeray »

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 not like there’s anything mandatory, so we set our release schedule and what a release means based on what makes sense.

Count your blessings. This is not the case everywhere.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#272

Post by randomdata »

nottorp wrote: post #267
oneshtein wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

To be fair, it probably also works in practice, but by very definition post-scarcity is a necessary precondition. And that is still an ongoing effort that has never been realized. Granted, the UN has declared food to have achieved post-scarcity status so clear progress is being made, but we still have more work to do.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#273

Post by jboggan »

wild_egg wrote: post #39
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…

> 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.

Real scrum has never been tried!

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#274

Post by gtirloni »

Clubber wrote: post #217
moribvndvs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

> 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.

Also feeling bad every 2 weeks because planning was really bad and now you need to say you're sorry the task has to roll over the next sprint and your manager has to explain to their manager, etc, etc.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#275

Post by nottorp »

Hmm I think 95% of the conversation in this thread can be summarized as:

Person 1: Scrum sucks at my job because X, Y, Z.

Person 2: That's not the ideal spherical cow! Sorry, it's not "real scrum".

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#276

Post by naavis »

nottorp wrote: post #266
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.

I don't think anything in Scrum dictates iterations must be one week long.

https://www.scrum.org/learning-series/what-is-scrum/

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#277

Post by nottorp »

randomdata wrote: post #272
nottorp wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it's not a SCRUM process at all. Case solved. Yeah and communism also works in theory :)

To be fair, it probably also works in practice, but by very definition post-scarcity is a necessary precondition. And that is still an ongoing effort that has never been realized. Granted, the UN has declared food to have achieved post-scarcity status so clear progress is being made, but we still have more work to do.

> it probably also works in practice

I've lived the first 14 years of my life under the Romanian communist dictatorship so no.

Let's put it this way. If it's the property of the people it's not everyone's in practice, it's no one's. So you're free to slack, cheat and steal from your "property of the people", you're cheating "no one".

> post-scarcity is a necessary precondition

There is no post scarcity. The goalposts for scarcity just move up.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#278

Post by Pet_Ant »

nottorp wrote: post #275

Hmm I think 95% of the conversation in this thread can be summarized as: Person 1: Scrum sucks at my job because X, Y, Z. Person 2: That's not the ideal spherical cow! Sorry, it's not "real scrum".

Well I think that comes from top-down micro-managing organizations that just want to call themselves "scrum". They want to do what they want to do and will dress it up in whatever language is buzzword compliant.

A director of engineering flat-out told me that being self-organising wasn't part of our scrum because we couldn't guarantee that each team made the same decisions and we needed developers to be interchangeable between teams.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#279

Post by filoeleven »

Rich Hickey put it best.

“What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race? Only someone who runs very short distances. But we’re programmers, we’re smarter than runners. We know how to fix that problem, we just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards, and call it a new sprint!”

https://youtu.be/liUiRfN9NzQ?si=CRkbMokVLXLIdF42

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#280

Post by freedomben »

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…

If you are working in a place that lets your team pick the sprint length each time based on how long you think it should be for the work you're doing, that is absolutely not typical.

You seem to be either taking your anecdotal experience with what was called "scrum" and projecting it back onto the spec. Or, redefining "scrum" to be what you think it should be, not what it is. Incidentally, I find nearly everyone who defends scrum does the same thing. It's a continual No True Scotsman that gets to the point where "scrum" becomes meaningless. I actually blame the Scrum people for that because there's a ton of things that are guidelines rather than rules, although the ultimate decision is with the ScrumMaster or PM, so the level of flexibility of the Scrum implementation is dependent on the benevolence of this ScrumMaster®.

I worked as a consultant for several years and have been at many different startups, so I've experienced a lot of different flavors of Scrum, and the effectiveness varies widely. There are Scrum implementations that are authoritarian hell-holes where devs are just mice on wheels, and there are some that are pretty good. The problem is, both are still "scrum." So it's a lot like saying "monarchy is good" or "monarchy is bad." Well, it depends a lot on the monarch, but the system itself gives an enormous amount of control to one (or a few) people, and then it's up to that person to divvy out autonomy as they see fit. You might get a benevolent ruler who gives autonomy, but you might not, and both fall under the system.

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