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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#351

Post by randomdata »

bruce511 wrote: post #80
cdaringe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ex manager here. managers are in an even worse wheel. biz demands managers show up to even _dumber_, less organized meetings than devs think they have to deal with. eng to eng meetings tend to be fine, but the rest of company culture at BigCorp weren’t trained in structured problem solving. it’s negotiating with goldfish half of the time (generally friendly goldfish), and no one actually practices any formalisms or l…

With software you have a situation with two problems. First is the "gap" between those doing the work, and those writing the checks. (When it's the same person, this problem disappears.) The guy editing the checks likes to understand progress is being made, and that the project both has an end and will be successfully completed. The second problem is that by it's nature software "never ends" and many (dare I say most…

> at least understanding the game might help you understand why his job is the crappiest of all of them.

Well, sure, but that's what the daily standup is for. So that the problem solvers on the team can understand the process, the problems it faces, and, importantly, find ways to optimize it.

But it seems, for how crappy you claim it to be, those in that position don't want to talk about it in fear that it will get optimized away. Job protectionism trumps all, I suppose.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#352

Post by mrits »

randomdata wrote: post #251
mrits wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is even good devs tend to work hard on the wrong thing. Accountability comes from your peers as much as your manager. If this makes you angry you are one of the bad ones.

Give good devs a direct line to the customer and they're apt to always work on the right thing, but will spend a lot more time dealing with the customer and a lot less time in development in order to do so. Leave good devs to play telephone through a middle-man, what we call the manager, and they almost certainly will work on the wrong things, but will have a lot more time to do it. I wonder which is actually more pr…

You generally don't want to act on customer feedback directly. Aggregating the feedback and making decisions at a broader level is a full time job.

Of course, if you are an early stage startup and one of your customer is half your revenue, sure. Do whatever it takes to make them happy.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#353

Post by ben7799 »

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…

Waterfall forces management to get it's act together. These processes are all about giving management more power and less accountability.

Product Management has fallen a tremendous distance from where it used to be. PMs who have come up completely under Scrum seem to think stories and epics barely require more than 1-2 sentences and the developers should have to figure everything out from there.

Even senior people in their early 40s have completely forgotten how to specify or document anything well.

It makes me wish I worked on something that involved physical products. The whole thing with agile/scrum is that management can change their mind at any time for any reason and the process gives them justification. It works in pure software, it doesn't work in anything physical because they had to sign the POs to buy materials and parts.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#354

Post by lo_fye »

marcosdumay wrote: post #254
Lutger wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The ages old "you are doing Agile wrong". When nobody manages to do the thing right, then the thing isn't good. It doesn't matter what platonic ideal you hold for it.

If I build a manual transmission car, and you insist on driving it like an automatic, it's not going to work for you, even though it's an amazing car. There are steps and processes that you must follow in order for the thing to work for you. If you don't, it won't. Simple as that.

Put another way, if you enter the olympics for breakdancing, and then just move your body around in a floppy way, you will not win the gold medal.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#355

Post by dartos »

freedomben wrote: post #297
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.

Interesting, because I was trained in writing classes to always have a "conclusion" where you make sure to summarize and restate your thesis for emphasis and focus. That AI does this feels like a result of training/emulating what humans do. If people think my writing is AI driven because of that, that's quite unfortunate. If we have to start introducing errors or mistakes into our writing so people don't assume it's…

I don’t think NOT having a conclusion is a mistake, but calling it “conclusion” is a stylistic choice that smells like AI to me.

It’s how style changes. Just like how websites influenced graphic design, AI influences writing.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#356

Post by prepend »

pyrale wrote: post #308
prepend wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I had a conversation with a young devTM who was arguing that estimating is hard and always inaccurate so we shouldn’t estimate. Plenty of learned people have made defenses for having no estimates. If you want to make the opposite claim, you don't need to use a junior dev as a strawman.

I think estimates are wrong but useful and necessary. I don’t think it’s a strawman argument at all.

For simple activities you can get by with no estimates but with dependencies estimates become more and more necessary.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#357

Post by prepend »

freedomben wrote: post #280
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…

I’ve never had variable sprint lengths, but picking the internal is exactly how I’ve done agile for years.

The whole point, I thought, is that you’re just frequently releasing so you want some fixed interval rather than adjusting it based on workload. Pick work that fits into the time period, not the other way around.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#358

Post by prepend »

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.

Scrum is not necessarily weekly. You can pick any period for the sprint length. I think I’ve seen two week as the most typical.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#359

Post by tjr »

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.

Especially the meetings which are held for the purpose of planning more meetings.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#360

Post by moominpapa »

Once upon a time, ivory tower "programmers" met in a cafe or something and grandiosely produced a manifesto called Agile and unleashed merry hell for poor souls who just want to produce something that works. Instead they must listen to managers who haven't written so much as "hello world", tell them how it should be done. I don't care of the intentions, it has been coopted into corporate micromanagement and busy work for deadwood corporate lifers. Enough, the original authors need to get back in that cafe and explain where it went wrong.
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