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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#361

Post by randomdata »

mrits wrote: post #352
randomdata wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You generally don't want to act on customer feedback directly.

Obviously not literally. What they want hasn't been invented yet, which means the words to accurately describe what they want also haven't been invented yet. But ultimately you do want to act on what they really, truly are trying to tell you. Indeed, figuring them out is a hard job all on its own.

> is a full time job.

Sure. That's the tradeoff. You can spend most of your time figuring them out, and then the small few remaining units of time you have for development will be on point. Or you can play telephone and have all kinds of time for development, but will more often than not go down the wrong path.

It's not really clear which is more productive at the end of the day. But we do know that Agile (of the Manifesto kind) pushes the former, while Agile (of the fake kind) pushes the latter. People seem to hate fake Agile more than they hate Manifesto Agile, so that does suggest that not playing telephone is more productive.

But, still, data?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#362

Post by mtrovo »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #35

I’ve been building software applications for 40 years. No matter how you slice up the work, we all have to demonstrate progress and goal achievement. Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Method 1, or whatever are all meant to measure success. In a lot of cases there is a client or a customer that requires regular progress reports. Management uses reports to measure team performance. I’m not sure what planet the OP is from, but this…

Yeah, I totally agree in theory, it doesn't really matter what methodology you use, at the end of the day dev management is just a means to an end.

The real issue comes from middle management folks who conjure up buzzwords whenever they need to justify whatever they think the team should do. Don't know how to structure tasks but want to look like you're in control to the boss's boss? Just throw up a Kanban board with tiny tickets and a burndown chart trending down. Sprinkle in some Agile keywords in the management reports and call it a day. And let's not forget that by 'sprint' they often mean moving unfinished tickets from the last iteration to the current one, plus tacking on surprise urgent tasks that were not planned before because the product owner never shows up to share their vision and priorities.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#363

Post by lispisok »

n_ary wrote: post #203
lispisok wrote: post #55

One of my favorite moments was when my non-developer friend at a tech company asked me what scrum masters did because she could not figure out what the scrum masters did at her company. I told her the answer which is nothing.

Schedule meetings, move tickets around, moderate meetings, call more meetings, scold misbehaviour during meetings, help management with their stuff(secretary/personal assistant?), scold other teams for not helping out in time, question about stale tasks(tickets), act as coordinator of news/requests/demands from other teams, attend all meetings which involve tickets, coerce/seduce other teams to deliver something earl…

I cant tell if you're making fun of or trying to justify scrum masters

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#364

Post by randomdata »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #290
Aeolun wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

You must have stopped reading too soon.

"The Daily Scrum is not the only time Developers are allowed to adjust their plan. They often meet throughout the day for more detailed discussions about adapting or re-planning the rest of the Sprint’s work."

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#365

Post by bdangubic »

tcgv wrote: post #291
bdangubic wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 26 years in the industry this is the only process that actually works - hire the right people and get the F out of the way

> hire the right people That’s no easy feat and often oversimplifies the challenge of building competent teams. I think it’s achievable if you have a large budget to hire only senior/experienced devs and a mature hiring process/team. Plus, if your company has strong tech branding, it becomes easier to attract top talent too. But if you’re at a startup with limited funding and possibly no branding at all, you’ll likel…

I do not disagree with anything you said at all! Though chances of success diminish here.

If you have to introduce some "process" - whatever that "process" is - because you do not have competent people and you feel like "process" will fix it, your chance of succeeding are a lot smaller IMO...

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#366

Post by randomdata »

borvo wrote: post #341

When agile first started it was developer centric and brought in the ideas of continuous improvement, inspect and adapt, eliminating waste (handoffs, extra communication etc). One of the core ideas was to look at what was working/not working - if it's not working you drop it. Then we got the scrum cult. Ironically it has led to a huge amount of wasted time and effort, as well as stressed devs. In a lot of cases these…

If a team has reluctance to drop something where you see a need to drop it, it is you who is not working. Will you drop yourself?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#367

Post by randomdata »

GoToRO wrote: post #310
hawski wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rest at all the meetings.

I hope this comment is sarcastic. Nothing is more exhausting than having to hear people that have no clue about anything, i.e. managers, speak.

You're not supposed to pay attention.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#368

Post by Silhouette »

Stratoscope wrote: post #52
wsc981 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things that come to mind: - burn-down / velocity charts - retrospectives - poker sessions - daily stand-ups - user stories and related tickets (eg in JIRA) There’s probably more ... Perhaps these things are not necessarily meant to make managers happy, though managers do seem to like this stuff. As a dev, I prefer a more fluid approach without all the rituals. In the start-up I joined a couple of months ago, we…

And sprints! When I started at my current job, I naively looked at the bugs and tasks assigned to me, and started picking and fixing the highest priority tickets. Then I was informed, "Oh no, that's not how we do things here. Don't look at the priority, just work on what is assigned to you in the current sprint." I had never heard of sprints before. More recently, I had a conversation with my manager and asked, "Do w…

"But if we didn't have sprints, how could we possibly measure the team's productivity and individual productivity?"

A more enlightening question might be what actionable information about productivity they are gaining from the sprint-based metrics.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#369

Post by randomdata »

semede wrote: post #78
booleandilemma wrote: post #20

We have a woman at my company whose job is to update Jira ticket statuses. Instead of allowing the developers to update the statuses themselves, she will often prematurely update statuses from "In Development" to "Ready for QA" before any code is merged. Or she'll update a ticket that isn't yet being worked on to "In Development". It repeatedly causes a lot of confusion. I think she feels the need to be so hands on w…

That job definitely shouldn't exist. I'm not seeing where the gender of the person added much value to the story tho

"We have a non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, bigender, demiboy, demigirl, two-spirit, androgynous, neutrois, third gender, polygender, maverique, hijra, kathoey, fa'afafine, man, or woman at my company whose job is to update Jira ticket statuses."

Better? (apologies to anyone I may have missed)

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#370

Post by happymellon »

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

Its also not for the business.

> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team

The business doesn't actually need a daily update. They think they do because they dont want to give you the ability to deliver anything.

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