Scrum is the new waterfall
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Scrum is the new waterfall
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Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#2I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take.
If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience.
If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not a good fit.
> It’s boring, its old, it leads to pointless meetings run by people who don’t write software, who don’t understand the technical process behind writing software and don’t always care
I dont think these people are meant to be running scrums.
> Adhere to the sprint commitment, even if you have to work over time.
Yeah, and you will be if you dont adjust your commitments as soon as you realise youre not going to meet them.
> Agile is about moving fast, building working software today and delivering with changing requirements
Yes it is. And scrum adds time tracking on top of that.
It sounds like you dont really know what the purpose of scrum is. And this is fair enough, because I dont think they had a very good explanatory service - it was pushed as the 'next big thing' like XML and SOAP was in the 90s.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#3I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…
Having worked on a team using Scrum, I agree with this: it's pretty much the least process you can have while still fairly accurately predicting when work will get done and when any given feature will show up in the product.
But it can be done well or badly: the team I worked on rigorously adhered to the process, and only cautiously diverged from it after careful consideration. Scrum done badly will rapidly become micromanagement instead.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#4This is so negative.
Look... the process can't be, "Hey you get all the time in the world to build undefined requirements with out providing any sort of insight." The reason you let people who don't code in to the meetings is because they pay your salary -- right? So translate. Give them something that makes them feel you are spending their money correctly.
It's not all that hard to just define requirements, put a line in the sand for what you think you can get done in a two week block, and show your progress on a board -- is it? This article seems to take the stance, "Devs are the only ones who matter and everyone else is someone who is going to make me sit in a meeting I don't want to be in." It's really immature to think this way, and short sighted.
You need some sort of process, some sort of roadmap, so your sales and marketing team can drum up interest for the product and the team can be successful growing the business. This isn't an academic exercise, it's a job, and you work on a team that requires communication to operate.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#5I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…
I agree with you. "Scrum is the new waterfall" is true in this case in that both have been built as total strawmen.
Scrum says nothing about unit tests, nor does it require sticking to the commitment (although it used to)
> I dont think they had a very good explanatory service
The most recent documentation on "Core" scrum is very simple and easy to parse.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#6But then you're working in a bigger business where you do actually need to interact with managers and internal/external stakeholders. And they're all asking you: «When can you deliver?».
Yes, estimating is hard. It's impossible really, but everyone knows this and accept the consequences of delayed deliveries and blocking events. But they want status updates and delivery schedules all the same.
Pointless exercise maybe? But in real life and in business actually having someone thinking longer than three days ahead is usually a necessity, in my experience.
I agree though that you should minimize the amount of pointless meetings and solve blocking issues as they come - this is more a sign of a good tech lead and healthy work environment rather than weaknesses in the Scrum methodology.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#7The fatal flaw of any process - scrum, kanban, waterfall, etc, is when engineering teams try to use them as a replacement for communication rather than as a communication aide.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#8I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…
edit: I just noticed they said 'sprint commitment', and that they should adhere to it even if it runs overtime.
This is probably the most wrong part of the article - you get done what you can, and let it affect your velocity. It is this velocity that is the central indicator of how much you can realistically achieve
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#9I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…
Having worked on a team using Scrum, I agree with this: it's pretty much the least process you can have while still fairly accurately predicting when work will get done and when any given feature will show up in the product. But it can be done well or badly: the team I worked on rigorously adhered to the process, and only cautiously diverged from it after careful consideration. Scrum done badly will rapidly become mi…
I feel like every time I complain about scrum and my frustrations with it to people who believe in it, the response is always "well you just don't understand scrum," or, "you're just not doing scrum correctly." If the process is really as good as it is supposed to be and espoused to be by scrum evangelists (including many of the coaches my companies have hired to help us implement it), then I wonder why it's so hard to do correctly.
I have worked with great engineering teams that have hummed along in informal processes that were similar to Kanban (though not defined as such). As soon as we were forced to switch to scrum, out productivity absolutely tanked, and we couldn't get the things we needed done because we were either in planning meetings all the time or we had to spend longer deciding whether to change our priorities mid-sprint as things would come up or lessons were learned, because that meant a lot of time and energy spent communicating up the chain why things did not get finished or the priorities changed.
Re: Scrum is the new waterfall
#10I don't really agree with this - Scrum isn't really easy to do but in many situations it is the simplest approach to take. If you need to monitor your progress in 'real' terms (i.e., whats actually completed) Scrum is pretty much the minimum ceremony you can get away with in my experience. If you don't need to do that, say if you don't have a deadline that you need to know you wont hit ASAP, then Scrum is likely not…
I agree with you. "Scrum is the new waterfall" is true in this case in that both have been built as total strawmen. Scrum says nothing about unit tests, nor does it require sticking to the commitment (although it used to) > I dont think they had a very good explanatory service The most recent documentation on "Core" scrum is very simple and easy to parse.
Yup, this guy sets up a total strawman which doesn't accurately describe how I've seen Scrum run at two major telecom software companies.
We change mid-sprint (when we need to), we don't have non-programmers running scrums or writing user stories and if you don't complete a story in a sprint then you roll it over to the next one.
If you have deadlines and contractual commitments to meet his suggestion of "use Kanban" strikes me as somewhat absurd. Running a team off of a Kanban board has its place (some of our support / platform teams use it) but I'm pretty sure your business owners want a better answer for when something is going to be delivered than 'when my Kanban board is empty'.