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

281–290 of 462 posts

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#281

Post by rickdeckard »

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…

I don't know which process you follow, but while sprints are created in collaboration, in mid/large organizations everything is supposed to be in-sync across departments (so you can align interdisciplinary tasks).

In most cases I've seen, Agile basically introduces an additional company-internal clock with tick-tocks for days and weeks.

To me the article correctly describes how agile is assumed to be somewhat abstracted from "real-world" time, but in reality it's just two other hands on the same clock with pressure and tasks still increasing close to "real-world" clock-events (launch-dates, exhibitions, customer-events,...)

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#282

Post by vegetablepotpie »

stetrain wrote: post #268
replwoacause wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There isn’t anything in the agile manifesto on how to do anything. It’s a statement of preferences and values.

Business demands process for people in functions to follow. Scrum outlines meetings for programmers to attend, and specific process outputs like user stories to produce and close. Scrum is agile in business because business cannot do agile.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#283

Post by freedomben »

naavis wrote: post #276
nottorp wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

No dictation on length, but the length is supposed to be consistent. If you want to take a three week sprint or something instead because the feature makes sense, you mess up a whole lot of things, especially the metrics. And, let's be honest, the metrics are the biggest reason why management imposes Scrum. They want to be able to quantify everyones contribution down to hard numbers that they can then use to know how everyone is performing. If you screw up the metrics, it won't take long for someone to step in and "get your team back on track."

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#284

Post by sevensor »

filoeleven wrote: post #279

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

I would love to bring some scrum masters down to the local high school track and have them run back to back sprints until the message sinks in.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#285

Post by freedomben »

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.

Heh, I say the same thing nearly every time a meta-discussion on Scrum/sprints is had. As a former sprint-runner, it irritates me to no end that nobody sees a problem with sprinting all the time...

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#286

Post by randomdata »

nottorp wrote: post #277
randomdata wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

That doesn't make any sense. Communism's defining feature is that there is no longer a state. How can you recognize Romania, and especially a Romanian dictatorship, without there being a state?

Perhaps you're confusing communism with rule by the Communist Party?

- Communism is a work of science fiction that imagines what life is like in a post-scarcity world – indeed, science fiction that some people would like to see become reality. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same basic idea, which you may be more familiar with.

- The Communist Party is a political group that, at least on paper, is focused on achieving post-scarcity through capturing the means of production. It was once theorized in a certain Manifesto about Communism that post-scarcity would not be achievable through capitalism as the capitalists would set up barriers to seeing it through, and that the way to protect against that was the bring the means of production into social hands. Hence why the Communist Party is so-named.

But that would be like saying that democracy doesn't work because you don't like what the political party known as the Democrats are doing in the USA. Or that workers don't work because you don't like what the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) did.

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

Perhaps. But it remains that communism cannot exist without having achieved post-scarcity. How could it?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#287

Post by patrickmay »

bfrog wrote: post #184
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…

Pizza sized teams that can directly interact with customers don't need management. Management is playing telephone with someone in the middle with their own interpretation of everything which is 99% wrong.

It sounds like you've had bad management (like we all have). Good EMs will unblock you, deal with conflicting priorities from stakeholders, provide you with air cover to have focus time, and help manage your career growth (among other things). If your EM isn't doing that, find another one.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#288

Post by rickdeckard »

Great description on what happens especially in scaled organizations, where sprints/iterations are supposed to be in-sync across departments (so you can align interdisciplinary tasks etc.).

In most cases I've seen, it basically introduces an additional company-internal clock with tick-tocks for a custom frame of days and weeks.

Everyone acts like this is more consistent and somewhat abstracted from "real-world" time, but in reality it's just two other hands on the same clock, with pressure and tasks still increasing close to "real-world" clock-events (launch-dates, exhibitions, customer-events,...)

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#289

Post by freedomben »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #5

We don't do agile, scrum, standups, etc. We meet 1x week to review where we're at and establish/re-establish priorities for the week if needed, use a ticket system for tasks to track progress, a high-level "weekly goals" shared doc, communicate on Slack as needed, and let the devs actually do the f'ing work the way they know best. If someone can't self-manage and produce without a manager over them, or reach out if t…

How big is your team? and company?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#290

Post by Pet_Ant »

Aeolun wrote: post #93
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…

I just completely ignore sprints, or sprint/standup meetings. Somehow it works well enough that nobody has called me out on it yet. If they all want to waste 2 hours a day, more power to them.

If your stand-up meeting is more than 15 minutes long you are doing it wrong. It's called stand-up for a reason.

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

> The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work. The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. To reduce complexity, it is held at the same time and place every working day of the Sprint. If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers.

If what you are doing doesn't match that, then it's not a Scrum stand-up.

Post reply on HN