151–160 of 486 posts
So what is an alternative process?
Spoken like a true scrum master. You don't have to produce an alternative to critique something. In fact making such a requirement makes problems linger.
I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor for a medium sized software company, but adjacent to their normal dev teams. I used to have the view that Scrum is a useless batch of meetings, that sucks the life and productivity out of the dev process. Now, after seeing it from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good…
> I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them. The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value. You can easily find 40 mid to low level coders and a half-dozen people who know how to run a…
And turnover you will have! =)
Note that you just ballooned the cost probably 3-4x compared to keeping the team small and strong. And that is how we got to this zombiecorn land we see today.
Also consider this - hiring a large team of bozos is a one-way street. You will likely never be able to hire and retain strong talent ever again. While you can always turn to hiring "mid-tier coders" when the product matures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them. The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value. You can easily find 40 mid to low level coders and a half-dozen people who know how to run a…
This, and more. Like it or not,the incredible success of software made it an industrial affair, the way clothing industry went 200 years ago - from highly skilled artisans creating unique beautiful designs tailor specifically to their customer to cheap patterns industrially printed. Its just that the printers are still human.
Not sure it's a great analogy though since software is still basically the design part - the duplication part is trivial.
I have a lot of issues with scrum and I think twitter post and the comments here touch on a lot of them, but one of my biggest annoyances with the whole thing that I hardly ever hear anyone mention is the term "sprints". If you asked a marathon runner how to run a marathon, they're going to tell you things like run slower, make sure you conserve energy, and control your pace. They're not going to tell you to mentally…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them. The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value. You can easily find 40 mid to low level coders and a half-dozen people who know how to run a…
I have been taking a closer look at project management and product management in the last few months. Coming from the programming side, I thought technical product manager rule the world, and thought everything that is technically led is glorious. Then I had a very personal conversation with hardcore project manager from non-tech side. He told me that, I got the idea of management of all wrong. Project manager is an…
The high demand, high pay and low general understanding of computer architecture all fuel this race to the bottom and we all pay for it in low quality, overtly complicated and vulnerable software and all ancillary industries that spring around it. Coding "bootcamps", "Cybersecurity", Agile/SCRUM, Wordpress and clones, AWS and clones etc etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No love for Scrum but this is the more likely explanation. A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value. Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.
If CEO can hire a 100$ scrum master to save a 1000$ failing team, it's much cheaper than hiring 2000$ successful team. That's probably what they're thinking
I'm going to get blasted for this, but you *are* doing scrum wrong. Scrum was invented by engineers to defend themselves against incompetent middle managers. The moment you let management take the process over and warp it you are already doing it wrong. Story points and sprints are a *self-calibrating* tool that will give you an advance warning (nicely visualized in burn-down charts) if an estimate you might have giv…
I've always said that Scrum doesn't fix problems, but it makes them more evident so you can fix them.
Teams that don't realize this are going to be unhappy about Scrum, but in my opinion they wouldn't be happy without.
Often the problems are one of these:
- Focusing on estimates. In scrum, a team doesn't really need any estimates beyond planning what they will do in the next two weeks. Planning poker, story points, estimations are just a means to that end. If you don't like them, don't use them.
- Focusing on ceremonies without understanding how to use them (or when to drop them!). I haven't done stand ups in years. I use online tools like geek bot. Retrospectives are just as useful as the number of problems you actually solve after they are pointed out. Planning is only useful if it produces teamwork, if the engineers all work in 1-person silos, it becomes a joke.
- Not understanding that Agile > Scrum. If you think you can be more agile without some parts of scrum, drop the parts you don't need. Being able to change the rules of the game in-flight is part of agile (and of scrum).
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> Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints This is not part of scrum
You'd be surprised at how many places this is. At a place I worked the management decided that a "story" should always be completed within a sprint. So what did we do? We started using stories instead of tasks and epics instead of stories[0]. And voila, now magically stories complete within a sprint! [0] Just writing that sentence makes my eye twitch
The title felt oddly hollow.