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

311–320 of 462 posts

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#311

Post by ebiester »

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.

"They are fixed length events of one month or less to create consistency. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint." - scrumguides.org

You also need to understand that "release" might mean behind a feature flag. Further, while continuous integration is not within the Scrum guide, it is a common practice in Scrum teams. Yes, there is a concept of a sprint goal, but the sprint goal may be a subset of the product goal. You may choose to group increments across sprint boundaries to present to customers independently of the end of the sprint.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#312

Post by whstl »

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.

My team works in an agile fashion. I simply stay out of their way and every week they finish what they promised to finish. The team is high-quality and hasn't missed targets or estimates. Most of our "ceremonies" are purely for socialization, as decided by the team.

But this is extremely fragile, because it takes a lot of energy to fight external people (often product people) who want to remove the self-management aspect.

Unless this is in the DNA of the company, you can't have agile or real Scrum, because it threatens those kinds of power-grabs. For this to work, you literally need someone threatening to fire people who attempt to micromanage others.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#313

Post by lo_fye »

sevensor wrote: post #284
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.

The Scrum Master is supposed to be part of the team, constantly helping with the Sprint, whether that's getting clarification for you, or pushing back on unrealistic expectations, or getting more resources, or whatever. Sprint was a bad choice of terms. It shouldn't have been related to races at all. If anything, it should be more like walking. It's about figuring out what pace is sustainable for your particular team, and sticking to that pace. Not driving anyone too hard, but delivering value (i.e. working software features and updates) at regular intervals. If a feature is too big to deliver in a single increment of time (Sprint), then it should be broken down into multiple features that build upon one another to eventually be the whole thing.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#314

Post by geodel »

Lutger wrote: post #229
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…

There are a lot of things better than scrum, but mostly these are all wrong ways to implement it. Daily: should average at 10 min, 15 min is really the maximum. Including prep. So 5-15 min. No status updates! The daily is about getting people unstuck with their current tasks and quickly aligning on what to do next. If it is not useful for the team, the implementation is wrong. Doesn't mean it always has to be useful…

> If you work in a team that doesn't adequately address these problems and you have no power to change it, then it may be time to look for another job.

Huh, this is same for all employers I have known or worked at. Maybe on some distant planet it is done right.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#315

Post by bluGill »

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

The business has a need for a regular status update from everyone. You can call it a standup or not. You can call it not agile, but in the end the business has needs and you cannot ignore those needs.

The business needs to know when something will be done as they need to make promises to customers. The business also needs to know when things will be done as that is a proxy for cost - they need to make sure they are not spending more creating a thing than it will deliver (this is a hard problem as some sales will not happen until it is done and there is typically a competitor customers could go with). That is nearly impossible to say how long engineering will take doesn't mean we don't need to know how long it will take!

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#316

Post by lo_fye »

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.

"Keep managers happy" isn't part of Scrum, either. If you read any of the Scrum books by the creators of Scrum, you'll find that the way 95% of companies implement Scrum is nothing like what Scrum was intended to be. They mess it up, essentially in the name of marketing, and not wanting to truly change their ways.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#317

Post by freedomben »

mrsaint wrote: post #150

When challenged why we'd scrum since we were doing better as a whole before (better products, happier devs), mgt replies that they'd need scrum to detail the work we did so that they could write longer bills to the clients.

Wow, that's remarkable honest of them! I actually respect and appreciate that a lot more than I would some BS about it being for your own good or whatever.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#318

Post by ebiester »

freedomben wrote: post #283
naavis wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

Metrics and software process are orthogonal. Now, you can argue that consistent processes across teams is used to enable metrics, but Taylorism is going to creep up any place that has management that has been infected by it.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#319

Post by bluGill »

stetrain wrote: post #292
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, so when someone says they are doing Agile instead of Scrum but don't like it because of the invasive status meetings, they're probably actually doing some form of Scrum whether or not they realize it.

There are agile processes other than Scrum. Scrum has gotten all the press for some reason, but there are other options.

I personally prefer Kanban. The sprint is not a useful deadline for me so I want to ignore it.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#320

Post by geodel »

relaxing wrote: post #160
repox wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why is the PM still employed? Hasn’t the team all quit?

Because in real world people play with the hand they are dealt with. Team hasn't quit because there are no better jobs with empowered developers are waiting.
Post reply on HN