Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

agileoverflow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#11

Post by freebish »

ramses0 wrote: post #3

Scrum / Agile can have failure points both technically (code/development) as well as socially (requirements/planning). It sounds like you've seen a lot of social failure points in your experience. I would hate to address all your complaints point-by-point, but I'll address the first which leaps out to me: that of a requirements phase prior to sprint start. In the training I've gotten for scrum, there's an overriding…

My experience with agile/scrum is that it puts a more important bounding function on the product/biz side, where they place demands. The most effective scrum meetings I've seen have been where the biz side presents its desires, then the engineers give them actual level of effort, then the biz side decides _right then_ that they didn't care as much about this feature or that. That's an incredible improvement over documents whizzing this way and that, meetings, spreadsheets with LoE. Instead, just a quick meeting of minds.

"I want the blue button very, very badly." "no problem. it will take three of us the entire scrum" "my goodness, I didn't want it that much. Ok, punted."

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#12

Post by derefr »

jghn wrote: post #7
br3w5 wrote: post #4

I think the OP's mindset is flawed and perhaps had some bad experiences/coaches with Scrum and possibly only one go at it? I'm not sure why anyone would say "Scrum doesn't want to solve this". When I've worked with teams new to Scrum and the question "how does this fit into Scrum?" comes up, I'll discuss with the team and we come to a pragmatic agreement that is right for the situation and context. Similar to TDD, I…

"but I definitely prefer it to waterfall" I pretty sure you're not doing this here, but there's a lot of options outside of the set of Waterfall & Scrum. All too often when scrum is debated it's often set up in the "well, at least it's better than waterfall!" argument. Great, that might be the case - I'd rather a kick in the ass than the nuts but really I'd prefer neither :) "the methodology too literally" As the say…

I think when most people talk about agile, or any specific instantiation of it, all they mean is "we're going to not-do-waterfall, and then intuit the rest, while attaching names from some methodology book to whatever results."

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#13

Post by derefr »

> Engaged as a service provider or consultant by a larger corporate customer and not authorized to make product decisions yourself?

Then you won't be able to do scrum. You have a waterfall built into your development process: requirements and designs are generated and committed to on the customer side, then "fall down to" the consulting development team.

Scrum (or, really, any methodology that attempts to keep time constant by managing scope) is an iterated conversation between the people who want things, and the people who make things. If the people who want things aren't at the table, you can't have that conversation, and so you can't control scope. Period.

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#14

Post by jghn »

derefr wrote: post #12
jghn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but I definitely prefer it to waterfall" I pretty sure you're not doing this here, but there's a lot of options outside of the set of Waterfall & Scrum. All too often when scrum is debated it's often set up in the "well, at least it's better than waterfall!" argument. Great, that might be the case - I'd rather a kick in the ass than the nuts but really I'd prefer neither :) "the methodology too literally" As the say…

I think when most people talk about agile, or any specific instantiation of it, all they mean is "we're going to not-do-waterfall, and then intuit the rest, while attaching names from some methodology book to whatever results."

True, and admittedly "scrum" has become the "kleenex" and "xerox" of the agile world. Fair point.

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#15

Post by rrrx3 »

scrumfailz wrote: post #5

There is a reason scrum sounds so close to bum, because they are both full of shit. Whilst the mediocre teams in the crap organisations lurch from methodology to methodology, paying consultants to lie to them in the vain hope of improvement, the rest of us quietly and quickly deliver software of value to our clients. The only good to come from scrum is more fucked projects for professionals to clean up later at decen…

I love that you weren't brave enough to make this comment on a legit account and take the downvotes there. Bravo (brava?) to you.

I agree that there are teams that struggle with Agile/scrum, but those struggles and failures generally have more to do with overall company culture than they do with the teams themselves.

Get a good Scrum master, with appropriate chops, a spine, and good people management skills, and you will have yourself a good scrum team. Full stop. Halfway embrace the process by letting your dev manager run scrum, or let your POs bully the team into things that aren't realistic, and you will have failure. It's as simple as that. Whatever project management methodology you choose has to be committed to fully for it to succeed. There's a reason why Project Management exists as a job outside of software development.

And you're fooling yourself if you really think that that superheroic "more fucked projects for professionals to clean up" line is buying you any credibility. I've seen more fucked projects and mountains of technical debt come out of "professional" clowns that swoop in to "fix" shit than I care to relate.

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#16

Post by qooleot »

qooleot wrote: post #6

"Your Product Owner is more like a Shadow Product Onwer" Typo with 'Onwer'?

Hey curious about downvote (honestly, want to know why). I didn't see anything saying that was a bad idea in the HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I felt the typo was one where I had to do a double-take and make sure it wasn't some purposeful acronym. So, I posted a quick note since it looked like the HN poster also was the article writer, and my comment would drift to the bottom quickly and wouldn't get too far in the way of a larger discussion.

I could see maybe I should have made my comment more verbose so someone wouldn't interpret it as being short or something? Or is there an unwritten rule about not making quick editorial comments?

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#18

Post by sheepmullet »

ramses0 wrote: post #3

Scrum / Agile can have failure points both technically (code/development) as well as socially (requirements/planning). It sounds like you've seen a lot of social failure points in your experience. I would hate to address all your complaints point-by-point, but I'll address the first which leaps out to me: that of a requirements phase prior to sprint start. In the training I've gotten for scrum, there's an overriding…

"Scrum/Agile (when properly used) has two main purposes... to better predict delivery of a particular technical capability (ie: when can I ship feature "foo" to customer "xyz"), and focus on keeping the product under development in a shippable state throughout the development process (ie: even though feature "foo" isn't done, I can still ship A, B, and C with minimal incremental work)."

A lot of people think that those are the core purposes of agile.... and that's part of the problem.

The real core purpose of agile is shortening the feedback loop. If you aren't shortening the feedback loop you are wasting your time.

Re: Scrum seems to be mostly about having better alibis

#20

Post by drisco »

My experience with scrum is that it is degrading to developers - it tries to turn developers into interchangeable cogs in the machine, filled with micromanagement (aka 'daily standups') and puts to much decision making power into the hands of the 'Product Owners'.

I'm a grown up, i can make my own decisions, i can talk to clients (in fact, i want to - no that, is not a distraction), and I don't need anyone looking over my shoulder all the time.

Post reply on HN