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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#181

Post by shortcake27 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #119
mwint wrote: post #46

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…

99.9% of “Scrum” you’ll come across in the wild is cargo cult. People performing the ceremonies with no fucking idea why, in the hope that the giant eagles will come from the sky bringing gifts. Scrum was created to help good developers communicate with management. But the problem is that management has all the power and couldn’t give a shit. If the management was qualified to “get it” you probably wouldn’t need it.…

I once worked at a place that did Scrum for the exact reasons you mentioned.

Every user story was the same - “As a business owner, I want users to be able to do x”. Defeats the entire purposes of user stories. But they were told they had to write stories. So they did.

We also had our work planned out 6-12 months in advance.

It was top-down waterfall disguised as agile, which would have been acceptable if we didn’t also waste 5+ hours a week in daily standups (aka status reports), sprint planning, retros, story breakdowns, all of which were scheduled at the most inconvenient of times to ensure they interrupted your flow.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#182

Post by bombolo »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #118
Camisa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great time to tackle some tech debt

Not if you can't work on anything without a ticket, and you can't add a ticket to the current sprint.

Ah yeah I had a boss that wanted me to open tickets, estimate them, plan them, do them, to fix 1 line issues that I would randomly find working on other tasks.

Normally I just fix them within a separate commit.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#183

Post by sharkbird2 »

superfrank wrote: post #102

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…

Completely agree, it has always bothered me as well. To me it (strongly) implies rushing, and I don't believe that constantly keeping your team in a stressful state where you are always rushing or 'sprinting' towards the next goal is a good sustainable long-term strategy.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#184

Post by jjav »

theshrike79 wrote: post #79
mwint wrote: post #46

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…

> > 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.

It's harder than finding uncaring juniors, sure.

But if you need 40+6 people, or 6 experienced people, that's nearly 8x salary.

In silicon valley money, you'll need to pay those uncaring juniors about 150K.

I guarantee you that you can very easily find those 6 experienced people in a few weeks if you're offering over $1M/yr to them. In a month you can staff all 6 positions.

If you're saying you want ~8x performance but not interested in paying ~8x salary.. then yes, it's harder to find the people.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#185

Post by bonestamp2 »

usr1106 wrote: post #170
bonestamp2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do a very loose agile process and everyone seems to like it. Basically, we have a standup every morning. Each team member has up to 1 minute to list (in very brief form) what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today. It identifies if anyone will be stepping on anyone else's toes, or if anyone knows of something similar and can point you to it, and it lets the project manager know if anyone is working on s…

A standup every morning? To my experience 10% of software developers think 7 am is morning, 60% something between 9 and 10. 30% not before 11 or 12. The first and the last group tend to be the most productive ones. Forcing all of them to meet at 10 or even 9 is the best way to kill motivation and foster cynicism about useless meetings and processes.

Each person is limited to 1 minute, and most people only use about 10-20 seconds. So, the meetings are usually done in less time than it takes to go to the bathroom. I think everyone sees the value in calibrating our trajectory for a few minutes every day -- it often saves more time than it consumes.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#186

Post by mpweiher »

telltruth wrote: post #60

Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during…

Er, no.

First, Scrum is not XP. Huge difference.

Second, even XP is not a "magic bullet". Nothing is. It's work that works. (Scrum, on the other hand, is not a "magic bullet" but simply a "bullet". Use it to kill projects very effectively).

Third, at my first real job after uni, we did most of the XP-like practices, and it worked amazingly well. But we didn't know about "XP". Partly because it didn't exist yet, as this was around the same time the Kent Beck started at Chrysler Comprehensive. When the XP books came out it was fun to have a name for what we had been doing so successfully. And also to compare and contrast.

Fourth, I had a great side-by-side natural experiment during my tenure at the BBC. My team did XP-ish things, mostly the technical practices, so test first/TDD, YAGNI etc. Pairing when necessary, but we were co-located around a desk "island" (sort of the way journalist workspaces are organised). My team succeeded far beyond expectations [1]

The team next to us, larger, more important and with way more experienced developers did SCRUM, but not XP. That project had to be rebooted completely after 2 years.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_...

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#187

Post by Shorel »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #138
mwint wrote: post #46

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…

>taking developers who can’t or don’t want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them That's a very charitable view... I think back over my career and it was always cargo-culting and micromanagement. I give you credit for analyzing and finding a way to make scrum work beneficially. The thing is - if you have people who don't (want to) understand the relationship between their…

The thing is, IMO, everyone has a hiring problem.

It is very easy to hire one bad player, and he takes the team down, and (in most jurisdictions) it is hard to lay them off.

The reason is, no one who knows what it is required, wants to do the hiring.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#188

Post by yesbut »

tacitusarc wrote: post #33
yesbut wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call it out as BS when it comes up in discussions. Spread the word. Stop going along to get along.

In a large organization, this will change nothing. All you can do is be in a trusted position with upper management, and spend your political capital to prevent it. Even then, it may not work if some exec has implementing it as a goal to help their prestige/career.

Problems aren't resolved unless people shine a light on the problems.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#189

Post by npteljes »

After 10 years in software development, going from junior to lead, I still fail to see the benefit of sprints. The best performing teams that I have been part of all worked around it, in order to make the team look good, in the eyes of the customer whom we sold Scrum to.

For features, I'd say that Kanban works better, when mixed with ideas from Scrum. Most of Scrum's ceremonies are useful without sprints, and gives, in my experience, the same value to managers as they do in Scrum. The overhead in administration and time that sprints bring are not worth it at all, though. And if management wants, commitments and planning can be done against a deadline, in the same way they'd do with sprints, just without the artificial short periods.

The tweet however contains lots of bad management, and general bullshit otherwise.

"Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously." I think this is fantastic, not having a single boss, but having different "hats". One person can also have multiple, for different projects. In my experience, this worked out well.

T-shirt and poker.... I don't see why they don't work as analogies, and therefore this is moot criticism.

Even the author himself acknowledges: that wasn't scrum, they were doing scrum wrong. So stop doing scrum? Why not do scrum better? What makes him think that the same bad management will do any other methodology better?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#190

Post by rightbyte »

avinassh wrote: post #94
telltruth wrote: post #60

Most people don’t know some history. During 1990s, a group of people made a fortune out of consulting gigs where they will be called in by their CTO friends in traditional enterprises to save the late and over budget projects. One of these people was Kent Beck. Kent will use his license to kill to turn things around and eventually generalize his rescue formula and sell it to make 100X more. His crowning glory during…

What's wrong with TDD

It is dogmatic.
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