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I don’t believe in sprints

robinrendle.com

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Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#151

Post by vsareto »

lwhi wrote: post #42

I don't want to be rude; but this essay really isn't useful. It's a rant. To the author: You don't like sprints or backlogs? Okay. So what's the alternative? Take step back, think about the problem that agile tries to provide solutions for. Now start thinking about new solutions .. spend some time; then write an essay that makes a difference.

>You don't like sprints or backlogs? Okay. So what's the alternative?

Apparently it's a team who can remember everything they discuss and plan between themselves.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#152

Post by throwaway284243 »

SkipperCat wrote: post #12

Are sprints bullshit? Maybe some of them. But for teams to be effective, you need communication, knowledge sharing and some form of tracking progress. A good manager facilitates these items. A bad manager just throws tickets on a Kanban board. Sure, if you have a team that can do all the above without sprints, that's great. But I bet they have some other method or social structure that makes team management effective…

10 years into my career I'm still waiting for this mythical "good manager". It's almost as if there's some intrinsic opposition between workers and employers, hmm...

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#153

Post by borbulon »

Sometimes sprints are the right tool to accomplish what you need to accomplish, and sometimes they aren't. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. You probably don't want sprints if you're building something. You probably do want sprints if you have a release cadence.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#154

Post by willcipriano »

melling wrote: post #116
hurril wrote: post #6

This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…

Yes, people like predictable. Tell management every project will take a month, and meet that expectation, then management will be happy. While someone else who takes the same work and says it’ll take one week then is consistently 2 days late will be viewed as less effective. So, by squeezing people into a guaranteed timeframe, in a mini death march aka sprint, you are forcing people to make [very] conservative estima…

My read of this is agile is primarily attempting to maintain the emotional state of the management team.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#155

Post by hebrox »

rob74 wrote: post #112
hurril wrote: post #6

This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…

And because you have sprints, you create lots and lots of small tasks, then focus on them, and then team members forget the "big picture" of how everything should fit together in the end (if they were ever aware of it). And when all of those small tasks are done, you notice that the sum of all those parts is not what you set out to build initially, and you need more time to shape it into something that resembles what…

I understand the feeling, but isn't everything eventually broken down into small tasks?

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#156

Post by HelloNurse »

websitescenes wrote: post #69
kwanbix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I never liked agile. I like to get a description of a problem. Prototype. Take that to that customer and ask for feedback. Iterate. QA. QA. QA. Release. That is agile for me. What is agile for you then?

I think maybe there is a conflation being made between Agile and Scrum.

An almost deliberate confusion between the agility of making changes to software easy and the agility of running like hell because you are chased by deadlines.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#157

Post by throwaway284243 »

bkq wrote: post #2

I get the hate for sprints, and the bastardisation of agile. I think however, the root cause of this is the way in which our society as a whole has been modelled, in a top down manner where control is wrested from the bottom, and perceived control is given to those in between. Each of these articles that make, valid criticisms in my opinion, always makes me think of Bullshit Jobs [1][2]. Most of our lives nowadays ar…

> I think however, the root cause of this is the way in which our society as a whole has been modelled

Yeah, so maybe it would be better if "hackers" simply start working alongside the rest of society, and give up trying to force misplaced and awkward hippie ideals into their planning meeting, that makes their work completely incompatible with the rest of the organisation, and society?

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#158

Post by amadvance »

I'm frankly puzzled how SCRUM sprints are even expected to work with a development + QA cycle.

When a sprint starts, what QAs people are expected to do ? When the developers finish, and QAs start testing, what developers are expected to do ?

It seems to me that this forced synchronization is just pointless and harmful.

Where I work, we handle "sprints" just like checkpoints. This is in developing stage, this is in testing, this is done. It's expected that almost everything spans more sprints.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#159

Post by pydry »

izacus wrote: post #71
robertlagrant wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every rant like this is a straw man rant overfitted to the writer's worst experience of what someone called "agile" in one of their companies once.

One of these days we might even hear of an example where following "agile" actually panned out. The question is - before year of the Linux desktop or after?

Agile is a nebulously defined cosmic aura surrounding all software projects in the world that go well.

Scrum/sprints are kind if like the bureaucratized and ritualized version of that. The Catholic Church to Agile's Christian cult.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#160

Post by steveBK123 »

xxs wrote: post #88
steveBK123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that was the overall vibe at my last place. Sprints are too micro and lead to tunnel vision. Got a lot of stuff done, but the hard tickets were always underestimated & dragged across sprints. And was it the "right stuff" to be working on to start with? Everyone felt like we were failing even as we got a lot of stuff done. Additionally, despite the attempt at predictability, wider project management was lacking,…

> tickets were always underestimated Teach the developers who estimate them to treat the process as the circle circumvent instead of the diameter and multiple by Pi. There you go - done.

Many tickets were also overestimated! They just don't stick out as a problem since they close early and make the sprint look good. Naturally, the ones that don't close are the ones that are underestimated!

If you overestimate everything then you end up idle at end of sprint & picking backlog items to bring in, so then product wants to put more points/stories into next sprint.

The system is seemingly designed to produce this outcome.

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