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Scrum Sucks

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Re: Scrum Sucks

#161

Post by kjs3 »

michaelt wrote: post #74
calvinmorrison wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you're on 4 teams

If a person is in 4 teams, and they're not a full-time 'product owner' where going to meetings is their whole job, I'd say something bizarre is going on.

I don't think it's that 'bizarre'.

My team has been an overlay team for years. We provide services to many teams. Since the glorious transition to agile and product focus, we had to sacrifice someone to be the product owner, so their 'whole job' is overhead management, which they hate. Now, every team wants someone from my team in every standup ("but we'll be blocked if a question for your team comes up and no one is standing in the corner patiently waiting to answer it") and definitely wants someone in every sprint planning. 8-ish person team, dozens of projects, and time disappears very, very fast. I've managed to push back on the 'every standup' nonsense so we don't spend 100% of our time in meetings, and in return the agile folks are using their 'metrics' to basically tut-tut and say we don't do any work.

I can see where if your whole job is on a single project where there workstream can be easily decomposed into 'sprint-size' chunks, agile and the rest are probably useful. But that's not every job, and maybe not most jobs, and it sure as hell isn't my job. But like so many other have concurred, and as I see on a routine basis, there will be someone with 'Agile' or 'Coach' or 'Product' in their job title will have an expansive explanation why I'm Doing It WRONG. Capital One seems to have figured it out...maybe there's hope[1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-t...

Re: Scrum Sucks

#162

Post by frankus »

I've never worked in a supremely functional scrum org, but as others have stated it may only really work if the whole org is on board. In places that I've worked there has always been a fundamental tension between how developers/makers work best ("leave me alone! It'll be done when it's done!") and how the rest of the world expects things to happen ("I need to know if it's going to be next week or next year"). I imagine organizations that can take the "it'll be done when it's done" approach are very much the exception.

So in the usual case that means that developers have to "waste" a not insubstantial amount of time making plans (that may largely be thrown away) and estimates (that might be off by an order of magnitude), and then course-correct over time (trading off time, scope, and quality) as they learn things while doing the project.

The other thing I've found over the course of the last ~25 years is that any kind of system (waterfall, scrum, GTD) is an abstraction that inevitably leaks. It's not somehow provably correct that if you follow a system perfectly that nothing will fall through the cracks. You can either admit that any model of the world is necessarily simplified, or you can keep retroactively adjusting your definitions of things in the model and at some point end up like a game developer treating a subway train as a piece of clothing, or arguing about whether a particular body of water is a "pond" or a "lake".

Re: Scrum Sucks

#163

Post by lars_francke »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #56
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…

Just by switching from Scrum to Kanban one can improve progress a lot. For being two very similar pull based systems the difference in effectiveness is just incredible.

Agreed. We use Kanban and are very happy. We used to not do any estimates but have voices from others asking for them to do better planning of marketing and sales activities. I understand where they are coming from but so far it's mostly guessing

So: Do you do estimation in Kanban and if so, how?

Re: Scrum Sucks

#164

Post by aeturnum »

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…

I've had good luck with small teams implementing "scrum" which really came down to: the team finding a minimal coordinating process that uses short units of work.

I will say that the part of scrum that I like (and I think most people like) are qualities that it's easy for like minded people to recognize. But if someone doesn't get...why it's good to summarize your progress for the team or break things up or understand what a task does for multiple stakeholders...scrum does not communicate that to them effectively. Imo it feels like a system you can use to teach people how to work effectively, but in general those who haven't seen most of it themselves often get buried under an avalanche of terminology and procedure.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#165

Post by Scubabear68 »

ineptech wrote: post #155

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 spri…

I think one of the biggest mistakes of Scrum is the Sprint concept. Artificially carving work into an X-week, immutable window makes no sense. Plan releases for when feature sets reach the level of maturity users and product folks want them.

The Sprint approach leads to half-assed features hiding behind a small army of feature flags.

At a minimum, if you can’t get rid of sprints, at least change the default 2 weeks into 3 or 4 weeks. Your meeting burden will go down add you’ll actually have time to deliver working features.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#166

Post by mirchibajji »

ljm wrote: post #80
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…

> Of course, the Scrum proponents will rush in and tell me that we were doing it wrong I don't think it's helpful in any discussion to try and pre-emptively dismiss people who might disagree. People have been doing that for the decade or so scrum has been mainstream and it just dumbs the discussion down to he-said she-said. That being said, agile as it was originally described in the manifesto was not prescriptive, a…

Just like "You are not your code", may be we should also have a "You are not your Process Certificate" mantra. It is not the people that are dismissed, but those who insist on The Process at all costs.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#167

Post by tapland »

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?

oh god no

Re: Scrum Sucks

#168

Post by olah_1 »

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Sprints only make sense for teams with more than, say, 4 engineers.

Because a Sprint is fundamentally about estimating bandwidth. You look at the old Sprints and are able to average out some kind of true estimate of capability, right?

But if you have a smaller team, everyone basically already knows what your bandwidth is.

Re: Scrum Sucks

#169

Post by comebhack »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #16

Aside: We need an alternate viewing filter for medium like how nitter is to X. Every time I open a medium hosted link it is just unbearable. Edit: The firefox reader view (F9) works very well at getting rid of Medium nonsense and making it clean.

Firefox reader is good, there's also scribe.rip which is like nitter for X.

E.g. https://scribe.rip/scrum-sucks-9960011fc5cf

Re: Scrum Sucks

#170

Post by lnxg33k1 »

I had an interview where communicated some critics of scrum, some that i agreed with experience and collected through posts about it etc, and was dismissed even without receiving no counterargument during the interview because they were looking some strict believers of scrum, it was an interview with a couple of non tech managers, i guess that’s the issue, scrum is a shallow version of XP who serves non tech middle managers, there is no criticism about it that can be useful to change anything, tech people already knows, but until companies keep useless middle managers around, the tech people just have to accept it
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