Why I'm done with Scrum • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#41

Post by mongol » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:02 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #24

The fundamental thing I've realized while looking for "the optimal end-state process" is that it doesn't actually exist . Scrum is, for many development organizations, an incremental improvement over what they are doing now. The biggest problem that I have with Scrum (and all prescriptive methodologies) is that it's presented as a vision for the right end-state instead of a set of tools that you can use to help find…

I so agree with this. If there was such a ting as "100% scrum compliant" it would be a bad goal to strive for. Not because it is bad in itself, but because the process should be adjusted to the situation.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#42

Post by mongol » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #36

the1 wrote: post #25

just code. code well.

That's kinda like saying that all you have to do to win the Superbowl is "just play. play well."

Exactly. And then it turns out you excel in playing squash.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#43

Post by skMed » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #37

> Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive. I completely agree on this one. I've worked in several corporate environments utilizing Srum and the planning meetings were always a huge waste of time. I would rather light my hair on fire than sit around a bunch of PM's trying to figure out what features to include/exclude. Also, most of the people (PM's,Dev's,IA's) I talk to always say, "Nobody does Scrum/Agil…

Perhaps it is the environment or Product Owners that are causing this slow down? Product Owners (PMs, etc.) should stack rank items in their backlog before a sprint planning meeting. This should make it fairly easy to allocate items for a sprint and identify features which either need to be 1. clarified, 2. split/scoped down. My sprint planning sessions have typically always gone smoothly as long as everyone came prepared and ready to contribute.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#44

Post by wccrawford » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #13

> With Scrum, there is an explicit commitment ... on what stories are going to be delivered within the sprint, No, there isn't. You adhere to your burn-down, not to your feature set. Scrum is time driven, not task driven. The whole idea is to become better at estimation so that Scrum appears task driven, when really it's just because your team is that good at estimating. > Iteration planning meetings are seriously ex…

>It requires the kind of buy in that, if you've got it, you probably don't need Scrum anyway.

I agreed up until this. I worked for a company that was doing waterfall and miserable. Things were getting done, but it was a sloppy mess. Clearly we didn't have our stuff together.

Our manager went and took scrum classes, and then we spent a few months trying it out. There was no day-one benefit, but over those months we managed to wrangle things around until everyone was on the same page. After that, things went a lot smoother. Management was actually planning things out (instead of just throwing projects around and hoping) and we had a clear view of what we would be working on at any given time. Shared resources, like the sysadmin and network admin and db admin, were able to be scheduled more effectively instead of project waiting on them, or them sitting around doing nothing.

So no, I don't think that Scrum requires the kind of buy-in that indicates you don't need Scrum in the first place.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#45

Post by dpham » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:10 PM UTC

I work at Webs and we also recently abandoned scrum for a more kanban approach. While all points in the article resonated with our company, the biggest problem we had was not delivering projects on time.

We focused too much on fitting as much work into a sprint as possible for maximized throughput. The problem with that, especially when you have alot of projects going on at the same time, is that alot of work was being burned across the board, but the needle for each individual projects didn't move forward fast enough and we ended up missing deadlines.

Another problem with scrum is that it turns creative developers into code monkeys, and this in turn lowers code quality. Developers are constantly worried about trying to meet deadlines for the next two weeks rather than taking the time to do things correctly. This ultimately creates technical debts and hurts the team in the end.

(also, if you're a manager and you use the developer points burned in order to rate performance and distribute bonus, then fuck you)

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#46

Post by skMed » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:11 PM UTC

g123g wrote: post #14

The #1 point mentioned in the article was my experience as well. For a tight deadline project if we decided to do everything based on the complexity points and team velocity it would take 6 sprints and a total of 3 months. But we just decided to ditch it and sit around a table and finished the whole thing in 2 weeks straight. So my experience is that if you are working with a dedicated team it is better to finish the…

Are you trying to say the overhead of SCRUM would increase the time to 3 months? SCRUM is a lightweight framework, so I am struggling to see how this could happen. Alternatively, do you think the estimation with points was the main problem and you couldn't get a correct feel for doing it without resulting in a conservative estimate?

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#47

Post by jt2190 » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:15 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #37

> Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive. I completely agree on this one. I've worked in several corporate environments utilizing Srum and the planning meetings were always a huge waste of time. I would rather light my hair on fire than sit around a bunch of PM's trying to figure out what features to include/exclude. Also, most of the people (PM's,Dev's,IA's) I talk to always say, "Nobody does Scrum/Agil…

In my experience most teams do planning completely wrong. The goals of the planning meeting are simply:

  1. Do a relative-size estimate the top n stories in the backlog. (Where n is 
    some number slightly larger than the number of stories that usually fit
    in an iteration.)
  2. Pick the stories to complete in the iteration.

That's it.

I often see teams:

  * doing one-by-one story estimation, and debating over how many points to assign.
    (The statistical method completely fails when it's done this way.)
  * getting into long discussions over the spec. (That's between the dev
    and product owner, to be figured out during the iteration.)
  * worrying too much about accurate estimates
  * worrying too much about how much work to take on

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#48

Post by brazzy » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:24 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #30

brazzy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cowboy programmer bullshit., the kind of thing mediocre but cocky programmers tell themselves to justify primadonna behaviour "having nothing and good developers you trust" is either a recipe for disaster, or a short prelude to those good developers coming up with a minimal ad hoc process that fits the project and most likely is remarkably similar to one established Agile methodology or another.

I completely disagree [1]. There's a difference between a cowboy programmer and a programmer that can go more than a day or two without checking in with his superior. In my personal opinion, based on the level of intelligence required to do good programming, the best programmers are self-managing. As a corollary to that, it's too expensive to hire development managers (in the traditional "management" sense) that can…

Actually, you completely agree with me. A Scrum Team very explicitly is self-managing. Agile processes ARE frameworks for coordinating self-management at the team level, and which have been found to work repeatably. That doesn't mean a given one will work everywhere. Specifically, Scrum is probably not ideal for startups doing something truly new, since it assumes there is someone who can prioritize features by their business value.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#49

Post by barrkel » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:40 PM UTC

vannevar wrote: post #35

barrkel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's fantastic when you're on a tight schedule! Instead of running fast all the time, you just sprint, then sprint, then sprint, etc! Works like magic. No one burns out at all.

Not quite. You sprint, then you take time to review and reflect on what you've done. Then you take time to plan what you're going to do next. Then you sprint again.

IME the "review, reflect and plan" is a one-hour meeting on a Friday, every two or three weeks.

Re: Why I'm done with Scrum

#50

Post by njharman » Wed, Sep 12, 2012, 5:41 PM UTC

Excellent observations based on actual experience.

A refreshing change from the usual "I don't understand what agile is but I did something I called agile and it sucked so I'm now blogging about how agile is broken".