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Scrum Sucks

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#151

Post by lapcat »

nine_k wrote: post #112
CharlieDigital wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone meeting This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings. Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup) I think it's emblematic of a few things about the founder/cofounder/lead: 1) they are an egomaniac and just needs to see everyone reporting in, 2) they don't…

As a counterpoint: back in the day (around 2010) at JetBrains we had a daily all-hands stand-up for several teams, about 15 people in total. It was literally a stand-up, that is, everyone stood in a circle. Everyone was expected to utter exactly two sentences: what has been done yesterday, and what are the plans for today. It usually took 10-30 seconds per person, so the entire meeting was under 10 minutes. It was pr…

Couldn't this just be an email instead?

Re: Scrum Sucks

#152

Post by nottorp »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #10

One comment - the article mentions that Waterfall was basically the only approach used prior to agile. This is false. In some industries waterfall was used, but in others software was designed and driven incrementally just as with core agile. The work I did in fixed income brokerages in the early 90s was largely ad hoc agile.

Every piece of work I've ever done was done in the spirit of agile. Just without the religion.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#153

Post by tonyarkles »

torginus wrote: post #107
Aurornis wrote: post #7

I added up all of the time we were spending in Scrum-related activities at a recent job. The company hired a lot of project and program managers who were pulling everyone into everyone meeting. I presented the number of hours (meetings multiplied by engineering participants) to our VP and he insisted I must be wrong. He insisted there was no possible way we could be spending that much time doing Scrum things and that…

Never in my life have I encountered anyone from the engineering side who spoke positively about scrum. It's always the consultants and scrum masters and their ilk who push the agenda. Never have I ever heard about any story about agile making things better.

I've worked at exactly one company where Scrum worked really well, but it was a somewhat... unique isn't the right word, but a specific set of circumstances:

- the team was made up of primarily junior engineers with a small handful of intermediate and seniors

- the company's work was split between a product and N consulting projects

- the company had standardized on a specific "default" architecture (Spring Boot + Angular) with a bunch of pre-existing components that teams could use to accelerate their projects

- the projects (product and consulting) were generally managed by the intermediate engineers with a handful of juniors on each project doing most of the day-to-day work

- the seniors were mostly on the product side but had latitude to go help on any of the consulting projects if anyone was stuck

Scrum with the daily standups and bi-weekly retros worked great here. The seniors went to all of them. If someone was getting ready to start on something and they weren't aware of existing components that were either available from the library or available to libraryize from a different project, we'd help facilitate that. If someone was getting stuck on either a tricky debugging problem (of which Spring Boot was good at making) or a complex design problem, one of us would stick around and just get it solved with whoever had the problem right away. And on the other side of it, we were sufficiently looped into the various projects that we could use that as input for larger-picture architecture decisions etc.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#154

Post by _ea1k »

unethical_ban wrote: post #108
_ea1k wrote: post #54

"Way of work should be defined at a team level by its people, not by the company." - This is basically the origin of scrum. Essentially every problem ascribed to scrum is its departure from this origin story. Scrum is about making each team work better, but somehow it turned into the same weird top-down imposed structure that it was supposed to replace. 2 week sprints are mandatory for all teams? They all have to sta…

Ha! At my old employer they used "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe). About a dozen teams of developers and operations people got together once a QUARTER to determine what big epics/objectives to complete, and then develop stories and estimates (points) for those stories and roughly which sprint they would fall into within the "iteration", as the quarter was called. Every team on the same sprint schedule. Fibbonaci story…

Don't forget to tag and label every story appropriately, use the corporate standard for sprint names, and file those tps reports on time. That would be great.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#155

Post by ineptech »

Two thoughts:

> "Way of work should be defined at a team level by its people, not by the company."

OP delivers that like a surprise, but isn't that the single core defining tenet of Agile? I thought it was.

> Sprint Planning — as simple as it seems, a long session (up to 4 hours)..

My big insight is, painful sprint planning is a result of painful deploys. Once you accomplish real CICD, you can just dispense with sprints and sprint planning entirely.

I'm not sure if that's something most people would agree with or not so I won't belabor it unless someone argues, but I can go on at length about that...

Re: Scrum Sucks

#156

Post by _teyd »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #59

It's interesting to speculate on why, if Scrum is so bad, everyone uses it? Is it because everyone is an idiot (e.g. management)? Or for some nefarious reason? Or maybe it isn't actually that bad? On one project I was on, there was a contractor company billing millions per year to create a React admin tool frontend. Many developers involved, Scrum master full-time, and so on. Tickets were created for small parts of f…

It’s a combination of cargo culting (nobody ever got fired for using Scrum!) and consultants who use it as a form of leverage to extract billable hours from their clients.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#157

Post by bee_rider »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #118
candiddevmike wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love hearing "points aren't time but you can think of them like days"

My response to estimating is that if you want anything accurate I’ll need time to estimate - roughly 1/4 of the estimated work should be spent estimating. As a rule of thumb, if the work is estimated to be a day then is should take me 1/4 day to estimate. If two days then half a day to estimate. If 4 weeks then 1 week to estimate. We normally continue with guesses that are meaningless.

What would you do if they actually gave you a week to come up with an estimate? Start drawing Gantt charts?

1/4 seems reasonable for a day or two, but I dunno… it seems like there must be some constant factor?

Re: Scrum Sucks

#158

Post by steelframe »

jsploit wrote: post #91
shortlived wrote: post #27

The things I've taken from scrum and use at every team: - plan in 2 week chunks - estimate in points (relative size to something you've already done), emphasis on consistent estimates for each dev. - make sure you define what 'done' means, and make sure it relates to what exactly you are trying to measure (Eg just coding effort, work till feature can ship?, etc). This is probably the most tricky bit. - capture total…

> estimate in points (relative size to something you've already done), emphasis on consistent estimates for each dev. > capture total velocity every 2 weeks and eventually use the avg for future planning This aspect of scrum has never made sense to me. Planning with average velocity turns points into an obfuscated time estimate - why use points at all?

It's a psychological trick to counter our bias toward scheduling optimism.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#159

Post by the_other »

nine_k wrote: post #112
CharlieDigital wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone meeting This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings. Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup) I think it's emblematic of a few things about the founder/cofounder/lead: 1) they are an egomaniac and just needs to see everyone reporting in, 2) they don't…

As a counterpoint: back in the day (around 2010) at JetBrains we had a daily all-hands stand-up for several teams, about 15 people in total. It was literally a stand-up, that is, everyone stood in a circle. Everyone was expected to utter exactly two sentences: what has been done yesterday, and what are the plans for today. It usually took 10-30 seconds per person, so the entire meeting was under 10 minutes. It was pr…

Sounds good. 15 people seems too big, but if you're keeping it under 10 minutes then all power to you.

Very few people care about "what did you do yesterday?". It's already over, by that point. There's a lot of benefit to removing that one.

In my team we do it like this:

- how are the nightly tests? (we've actually dropped this in recent months)

- what's in the Test column, and does it still need manual testing? (we have automated unit and integration tests but also, sometimes, do manual testing just so a 2nd pair of eyes has seen a thing work. We're not strict about it)

- what's in the code review column? Are any of them stuck/unreviewed/etc? (to remind people to do reviews)

- what's in the progress column that needs help/pairing or some kind of management support?

- any other business

With these three rules:

- save the details for other, more focused meetings or Teams. Anyone call time on any discussion.

- strict max 15 minutes time-limit

- jokes are fine

Works well enough that the next time I work in a team that doesn't do it this way I'll do all I can to move them to this format.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#160

Post by the_other »

lapcat wrote: post #151
nine_k wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint: back in the day (around 2010) at JetBrains we had a daily all-hands stand-up for several teams, about 15 people in total. It was literally a stand-up, that is, everyone stood in a circle. Everyone was expected to utter exactly two sentences: what has been done yesterday, and what are the plans for today. It usually took 10-30 seconds per person, so the entire meeting was under 10 minutes. It was pr…

Couldn't this just be an email instead?

No. No-one will read it and it slows down "what collaboration do we need to set up today" aspect.
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