171–174 of 174 posts
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I've been asked to provide estimates on something in hours, and it had no requirements. They'd use this for planning purposes. It's a waste of time.
That sounds like the estimation process was screwed up, not that all estimation is a waste of time
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If you replaced the word "scrum" with the word "agile" in the message above, would you still advance the same argument? Would you say that the problem with agile is that people are talking about how this or that should be more agile; or how a company isn't really agile; or how the way it does things violates the values or principles of the Agile Manifesto? If you would, then why does it seem a problem for you when th…
> scrum is as good a place to start as any No, it's not. It's a very bad place to start. Because Scrum is a fixed process, with a fixed meaning. If you started with Scrum and then stopped doing sprints because they weren't working for your team, you would quickly run into all sorts of opposition around "we're not doing Scrum properly; we need to be doing sprints". Whereas if you started with nothing, no process at al…
I completely agree. The reason I think it's a great place to start though is because this fixed process, with its fixed meaning, is well suited to the work involved in building new products.
> If you started with Scrum and then stopped doing sprints because they weren't working for your team...
...then you would stop doing scrum.
The objection "we're not doing Scrum properly; we need to be doing sprints" would only make sense in the context where you would be pretending to continue to be using scrum after throwing parts of it away. The moment you stopped doing sprints, you have made a decision that scrum as a process isn't working for you, and have switched to something else. You shouldn't keep calling it scrum to avoid confusion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you replaced the word "scrum" with the word "agile" in the message above, would you still advance the same argument? Would you say that the problem with agile is that people are talking about how this or that should be more agile; or how a company isn't really agile; or how the way it does things violates the values or principles of the Agile Manifesto? If you would, then why does it seem a problem for you when th…
> It is one of the ways of putting the manifesto into practice. It is not because it specifically mandates a given methodology imposed upon a team. The ethos of the agile manifesto is precisely the opposite. And Scrum might be a good place to start with in theory, while in practice, it's become in many corporations as the standard way of operations. It's "what everyone do". It's the "best practice". It's also become…
> It is not because it specifically mandates a given methodology imposed upon a team.
You are misreading what I have written.
Yes, Scrum specifically mandates a certain set of practices. However, all these prescribed practices are aligned with the agile manifesto. The manifesto never said be anarchic. The manifesto never said do not follow any processes in your work. If that were your understanding of the manifesto, you would have to object to all and any processes that have any predefined structure to them. Code reviews? Nope, that's a process. Pair programming? Nope, that's a process. TDD? Nope, too rigid. And so on.
Scrum is A way to put agile values and principles into practice, not THE way. But it is certainly not antagonistic to the manifesto.
> And Scrum might be a good place to start with in theory, while in practice, it's become in many corporations as the standard way of operations.
I am re-reading this sentence, and the previous two paragraphs, and just can't connect them together into a coherent thesis. Scrum is a good place to start in theory? — Well, yeah; that's what I've been saying here. — But in many places Scrum is practiced atrociously? — Well, yeah, don't do it atrociously then; do it properly.