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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#381

Post by icedchai »

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?

The real question is why is the team putting up with this? They should be complaining about the PM and wasted time every chance they get, at the "retro", team meetings, and 1:1's... Complain, complain, complain.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#382

Post by rerdavies »

jghn wrote: post #114
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…

It Depends. I said in another post that I hated all the ceremonies, including standup. And it goes without saying that means long standups. But, one team I was one, we had long ass standup and it was perfect. It was very dev-driven, we were facing hard problems, and that was our time of the day to really nerd out. The PM would get bored after about 15-20 minutes and then we'd be working out how to deal with the issue…

That seems unproductive. You end up having a room full of people discussing problems that should be solved by one or two people outside of the standup. That's contrary to what a stand up meeting should be. Don't do that.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#383

Post by seadan83 »

bluGill wrote: post #315
stetrain wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Agile is meant to be a collaborative process with a user or customer to discover the truly desired objective. Baked into agile is the notion of changing courses. A business that wants a deliverable by a certain date wants a contract - not Agile. How can a route be predictable look with a process that explicitly seeks to regularly change course.

We could also get into the theory of whether it is actually possible to say how long software will take at all. Business might bevroutineky asking for the impossible using the wrong methodology for what they think they want

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#384

Post by rerdavies »

jjav wrote: post #186
wild_egg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong". Scrum is a victim of semantic drift. The vast majority of people "doing scrum" have never read the guide and are just doing things that other people have told them is Scrum. It's not Scrum's fault that people have hijacked its name for something completely…

> People using the wrong word for something doesn't mean the original definition of the word is invalid. It doesn't make the original definition invalid, but words mean what society uses them to mean, which changes over time. So agile & scrum do in fact today mean constant status meetings, treating professional developers as mindless cogs and keep everyone in line with a constant stream of tickets chosen by someone e…

Scrum (or agile) done wrong is a unimaginable nightmare (I actually do have first-hand experience with that). But, overwhelmingly, my experience with scrum has been nothing but sweetness and light. When it is done right, all the stress melts away. Seriously. Just an absolute joy.

Are those who have toxic experiences with scrum actually a majority, or are they just a vocal minority? I'm curious if there's any data on that.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#385

Post by rerdavies »

carlmr wrote: post #156
roenxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company isn't optimising for fastest development speed. They typically optimise for low variance, consistent value in support of existing processes. Interestingly, if you want highest value then for software it is best to use a high-variance strategy. But that is never going to come out of a company large enough to need professional management because it is pointless to manage large numbers of people to a high va…

>scrum elevates them from total failure to unproductive but fumbling in a good direction. Where's the evidence for this? I kind of agree on big corporate not being able to achieve great development speed. But they had a system before scrum, and I've yet to see scrum not completely destroying every metric of development achievement, whether it's throughput, latency or iteration speed.

Compared to what, exactly? I can't imagine you could say anything like that if you had experience with any of the heavy development processes that preceded scrum/agile methodologies.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#386

Post by JonChesterfield »

cdaringe wrote: post #27
saulpw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you are a manager, can you at least change how things are done for your team?

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…

The meetings between engineers are rather unstructured. I hadn't really thought about what meetings between business types would be like. Decisions get made in those that affect whether the company is a viable going concern. That makes for a very uncomfortable line of reasoning.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#387

Post by rerdavies »

carlmr wrote: post #209
ath3nd wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I will say that if that is a demonstrable thing It's demonstratable: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/ > and there was no upside I'd go on a sarcastic rant here, but it's hard to stop myself. Don't read further if exaggerations upset you. Sure, there are upsides, but they are hardly benefitting software engineering speed, quality, stability and developer happiness. The biggest ups…

>two parental figures (the PO and Scrum master) Another great point. The overhead is insane. 2 people that don't directly contribute work output per team.

Could it possible be that.... you're not doing it right. lol

It is another great point. But it is another great point about how the process in your organization could be improved. Nothing says you have to have two parental figures.

And why on earth would you have a dedicated scrum master?! It's just not a job that should be requiring that much labor. Just have one part-time scrum master in the entire company who periodically audits and coaches teams who aren't doing the process right. Or coaches teams through the initial learning curve, as required.

In scrum and non-scrum processes that I have worked with, the PO comes from the marketing/sales team. On the theory that, if anyone has the pulse of what customers in aggregate actually want, it's going to be them. Also a part time job. But essential for injecting some realistic sense of "value" into the development planning equation. The direct contribution of a good PO is to make sure that the team is contributing work output to features that customers actually want. A good PO contributes enormously to team productivity.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#388

Post by rerdavies »

the_other wrote: post #300
lpapez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. This, this, this and a thousand times this. It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong". It's like when discussing communism with some diehard fans - when you point out the flaws, the response is…

> It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong". Well, you are. Give this shitty process you’re being forced to follow some other name and stop blaming Scrum. Do Scrum properly and you’ll see why it’s actually fairly good. > if most attempts ended up implementing it "incorrectly" in the end, it's not a ve…

But on the other hand, capitalism is not resilient to the kind of psychopaths who end up becoming billionaires for life. So there is that.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#389

Post by rerdavies »

Aeolun wrote: post #82
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, if the scrum guide explicitly says they shouldn't then it isn't really fair to blame scrum for that. Honestly, the recurring complaints with scrum, agile, etc basically boil down to this: shitty organizations can make any system miserable. People generally are blaming the intermediate cause (how we do scrum sucks) rather than the root cause (our company sucks and nothing would work).

We blame scrum because the framework provided makes it a lot easier for life to be miserable.

Compared to what?

You haven't truly experienced process misery until you've done a 4 year death march in a waterfall process.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#390

Post by rerdavies »

bboygravity wrote: post #105
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, if the scrum guide explicitly says they shouldn't then it isn't really fair to blame scrum for that. Honestly, the recurring complaints with scrum, agile, etc basically boil down to this: shitty organizations can make any system miserable. People generally are blaming the intermediate cause (how we do scrum sucks) rather than the root cause (our company sucks and nothing would work).

Oh, the good old "the user is doing it wrong, the product is fine" with scrum being the product. Can anybody (not PM/leader) give 1 example of a company where they saw scrum being done "correctly"? crickets I guess scrum is fine and people just don't know how to do it properly.

Me. I've worked in a company where scrum was being done properly. It is wonderful.
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