How do I avoid this in my career?
Scrum is a cancer
11–20 of 486 posts
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#12agile is fine (ie delivering features incrementally) but the scrum process around it is useless.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#13Interesting phenomenon happens at my place which is scrum + Safe. Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints, so if we finish our work with 2 days left the manager asks not to start anything new.
The process is a performance within a performance, literally getting told NOT to do more work. This is what happens when you have chart-oriented-development (particularly jira's toxic charts).
You might think this is nice to have free time to sit around, but frankly it also drains a lot of the joy out of my work, takes away my sense of autonomy and pride in my work and leads to some resentment.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#14From Peopleware: “In the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study [from the University of New South Wales]…they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others…Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (‘Just wake me up when you’re done.’) had the highest productivity of all.”
I read 20+ books on management and leadership[1], and none of them mentioned anything like Scrum. I agree it's BS.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#15Scrum gives me the same impression as liberal economics. An intellectual tradition centered around quantifying things that can't reliably be quantified, as well as projecting incomplete models on top of reality in service of economic interests and insisting that they are correct.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#16My company bought into the SAFe bullsh*t and it’s awful.
Is there an alternative anyone would recommend. It might not be the best question to ask given the complexity of the software and experience/culture of the team.
This is a very unsatisfactory answer - but you have to grow a culture. Working with people to match their personal goals with organizational goals. High degree of mutual trust. Cooperative design. Group ownership of the codebase and rotating responsibilities. Lack of 'magic knowledge'. Sufficient infrastructure development to reduce rote workload on developers.
All of these are organic rather than formulaic. They require limited rates of growth to enculturate the new hires, and a seed group that understands this.
That works. But you can't hire a consultant to build that, or write a book about it. And bad elements in the mix can mess up the whole thing.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#17Typical immature bullshit where someone describes their own company's screwed-up incompetent so-called "Scrum" and "Agile" implementation, and then claims that that's universalizable amongst all companies everywhere. Just because a so-called "Scrum Master" not worth the title is forcing you to do BS things that inhibit your flow does not mean it's emblematic of the species. I mean, how would you feel if someone gener…
Typical Scrum apologist who describes how someone else must have screwed up Scrum or Agile. They then claim that pure "Scrum" or "Agile" has never been implemented anywhere. If only people weren't so ignorant, we could give pure Scrum a try and solve all the world's problems.
> They then claim that pure "Scrum" or "Agile" has never been implemented anywhere.
They are right, however the conclusion that should be drawn from this is that the most likely outcome of your organisations implementation of agile will be equally as poor, and that it should prolly be skipped.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#18[deleted]
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#19> Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control.
Agile and Scrum are for managers who don't know what they want, but they'll "know it when they see it". (Or more likely, they'll declare that they wanted is what they've got when the money runs out.)
Just stay away from it, if at all possible.
Re: Scrum is a cancer
#20If you're in a situation where someone is suggesting applying an off-the-shelf process like Scrum or SAFe, you've already lost.
> 3. We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention.
This continues to be one of the most aggravating parts of capital A Agile software development. Forcing people to be uncomfortable to make them talk less is something a child would come up with.