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I don’t believe in sprints

robinrendle.com

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Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#161
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…

You start with dismissing this out-of-hand... which is weird, because you pretty much agree:

> ...probably not the best method and maybe it's not even good

It doesn't sound like you believe in sprints either, but can't imagine something better.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#162
I loved working in sprints. My last two jobs have used the term, but not the ceremonies, and it's not unusual for tickets to be quietly moved from sprint to sprint while in progress.

Without agile ceremonies, the quality of tickets can really vary depending on who is writing them. I think there's something to be said for a group of devs looking at a task and deciding if there is a clear AC and discussing how difficult that task is. Without these sorts of ceremonies you can get into situations where you work at a task for days, put the PR up and then get told "Oh we probably shouldn't do this". This has happened to me multiple times at my current and last job.

I also think that for certain types of people, the model of committing to a certain number of tickets for a certain block of time makes it easier to structure and plan that time. Certainly it does for me.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#163
Ah yes another article that says we don’t need management tools, if only, our team was a small handful of smart people.

And if the work gets too much then I guess we just work harder to the bone —- because woe us if we should possibly have to grow and delegate, let alone in a scalable, organised and structured way?

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is predictable, the majority of software engineers predict it at work every day (or every 2 weeks in sprint planning). Why do we need predictable deliveries? Because if Bobby from accounting doesn't have your piece of software ready by the 31st of November the company will be slapped by a fine from the IRS so large that you'll need to update your CV alongside all your colleagues from the now bankrupt comp…

> Why do we need predictable deliveries? Because if Bobby from accounting doesn't have your piece of software ready by the 31st of November the company will be slapped by a fine from the IRS so large that you'll need to update your CV alongside all your colleagues from the now bankrupt company you used to work for. Yep, at the end of the day, the whole world can't run if everyone is a professor emeritus just freely e…

In what company is accounting moving to software which isn't ready, and where they will experience a large fine if it's not, guaranteed by a 2 week promise? Rational people just don't do this. Especially considering how often we're wrong even when we define sprint boundaries and point all the stories.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#165

I get the sense that the OP has never worked on a large team or massive product with a large surface area and competing goals. I get it, for a lot of smaller endeavors that only have a few devs then sprint ceremonies would be overkill. But if working on large project with many teams, the lack of structure would be almost certain death. Entertaining tirade though.

> for a lot of smaller endeavors that only have a few devs then sprint ceremonies would be overkill

Nevertheless, such small teams (in my experience) use Scrum as well and it is indeed overkill.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#166
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked the joke when I heard it. Reading it now, I'm realizing that "marathon" doesn't fit as a metaphor because we don't know the destination. Orienteering, perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienteering

Marathon works perfectly to show how bonkers the idea of sprinting is. I like the idea of thinking of software development more as orienteering, if anything, it doesn't go far enough. To deliver full-featured software in time (note I didn't say on time , but there is certainly such a thing as delivering too late) is 10% velocity and 90% dependency resolution. I'm still looking for a tool which thinks primarily in ter…

I’ve always been confused about deps being an after thought in project management.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#167
How is a backlog useless? Every company doesn't have an infinite supply of engineers. They can only work on a subset of the tasks you have planned. Backlog is simply the set of tasks that are not the most important thing right now. If you finish your spring early, simply pick up something from the backlog.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#168
Ok. You don’t believe in them.

You’re the lead of an 8-person team. How do you get everyone rowing in the right direction and shipping software? It sounds like you’d just leave everyone to sort it out themselves and believe they will build the right thing and ship it on time.

I don’t think sprints are a required practice. I’ve used them with teams simply to help shield them from micromanagement and get them used to iteration cycles. They were held up on releasing anything until a huge batch of features was perfect. Only every deploy into production was met with a week or so of overtime fire fighting because the amount of change they were introducing to the production environment was too large and their staging environments were always under provisioned and didn’t have the same load. Sprints helped them break down work instead of crunching for months at a time.

After a while they didn’t need it anymore. So you change things up.

Where it goes wrong I think is when people start copying the practice hoping that following the rituals will grant them good software.

You still need something though. A little planning goes a long way.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#169
Sprints are a container of fixed size to put work into. This container can be useful sometimes, but that depends on the nature of the work being done, the humans involved, the group social dynamics, and a myriad of external factors. There are combinations of those parameters where the sprint is almost always the wrong container. As an example, take pure or applied research. I've seen such work shoehorned into sprints to the detriment of productivity, to the point of killing it almost completely.

Related to this is that sprints and their associated concepts mechanize and formalize something that may or may not need such. Applying something like Scrum almost always has one engaged in motions that are disconnected or even counter-productive to the local environment. That said, it sure is a lot easier to pick a methodology off the shelf than it is to engage in sober, thoughtful, and rational assessment of your situation's organizational needs. There's also risk inherent in that too, but one effective counter to that is to incrementally add/subtract process as needed.

Given the above, I consider process-heavy management to be a signal for prospective employment -- on the very much negative side. It tells me a few things, mainly about the way management's group mind works and also about what my future role in such a group would be (i.e., more part of organizational machinery than a creative agent).

The last point I'll make is that I just find the experience needlessly draining. A job typically lasts years. It's more of a marathon than a sprint. If it was a marathon with a few necessary sprinting periods, that might be bearable. If you really are sprinting constantly (the next sprint starting immediately after one concludes), that's a good way to generate burnout.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#170
post #65

Sprints and (point-based) estimations on tickets are not to improve software quality, they are to improve manageability of the software development process. If you work at a product shop, you might well be able to do without them. If you build software for clients, the planning is VERY important in order keep the client happy. Knowing ASAP that the project is going to miss a deadline/budget/feature is key to whomever…

Are your projects just two-week projects for the client? Or, if they're longer, do you plan out all the sprints in advance (which isn't really Scrum best practices as far as I understand?). I mean if you have a larger project (larger than two weeks) and you just plan for the next two weeks (as Scrum tells you to do, as far as I understand) how do you know that if you deliver this sprint you'll be able to deliver the project?
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