Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#191

Post by Sammi » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:34 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #103

I think people don't understand the reason and given flexibility tend to choose completely counterproductive things to do. For example the only purpose for points and velocity is to give product owner idea of how much time will have to pass before a thing might even have a chance of being done. It tells him that you, for sure won't get this thing and that thing in next 2 weeks. The only utility of points for the deve…

And velocity is not comparable between teams, because different teams will normalize their complexity points differently. The amount of complexity points that any type of task is given, is supposed to be emergent in that team, because this makes a team's optimism/pessimism bias moot. The reason to use complexily points and not time estimates is also exactly this - to remove preconceived anchoring.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#192

Post by davidwf » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #103

I think people don't understand the reason and given flexibility tend to choose completely counterproductive things to do. For example the only purpose for points and velocity is to give product owner idea of how much time will have to pass before a thing might even have a chance of being done. It tells him that you, for sure won't get this thing and that thing in next 2 weeks. The only utility of points for the deve…

I wish I could highlight this a million times over. The idea of story points (which I have mixed feelings about regardless, but are not as bad as the author of the article mentions) is to produce a useful measure, which becomes instantly useless once it becomes a target. Once you start saying that you have to meet a certain velocity, you've gone off the rails.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#193

Post by douche » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #188

> What I have a hard time understanding is why the ancient, simple communication form of text is given second seat. The truth of the matter is that, especially under the constraint of distributed teams, it's difficult to beat text. That's a really good point. I'd be excited to see what a team could do if each developer wrote a one-page memo about what he did and what he was going to do once an iteration, and a few se…

What a fantastic history of a project that would be...

Maybe we could just go back to .plan files, like Carmack.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#194

Post by GrumpyYoungMan » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #101

nutheracc wrote: post #69

NoEstimates: http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/the-noestimates-moveme...

That's a great idea if you don't have any customers or constraints. In the real world, there are externalities that have an impact and require some estimation. Maybe we have to provide new support materials to customers, or finish a contract with a third-party data provider, or change our infrastructure. It's exceptionally hard to do some of these things without being able to make commitments of some kind. Estimates…

>If I hired a builder, and he told me that he refused to estimate the amount of money or time it would take to construct my property, you can be sure I'd move on. I have no idea why we'd consider it appropriate for an engineer to do this.

When every builder (i.e. engineering team) anyone ever hired everywhere blew through their estimate ~70% of the time, perhaps it's time to reconsider that stance. See the Standish Group's annual CHAOS Report for an example of software project success statistics, e.g.: https://www.infoq.com/articles/standish-chaos-2015

Estimates are just mutually agreed upon lies that engineering teams tell themselves.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#195

Post by bmurphy1976 » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #166

ozmbie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that two weeks you spent writing excellent code is mostly useless unless you have a way to get feedback on it. As a customer, you've given me no value. What if you finally hook up UI to the sub-component and the customer/stakeholder decides they don't like any of it? You could have known about it earlier.

> As a customer, you've given me no value. Erm. But it's you who is the customer in this scenario, not him? Or am I missing something?

Customer is a poor term. It should be stakeholders. Sometimes the stakeholders aren't "customers" per se, they could be other parts of the organisation for example. I'd consider my CTO a stakeholder and I'm pretty sure he's interested in the value of fixes for a security audit or working database backups even though those don't necessarily have a nice demonstrable UI.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#196

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

marpstar wrote: post #186

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I sometimes say at my workplace that we should make our projects in Flash. Faster to make an interactive UI this way and get the approval of the management/customer, no time wasted on useless things like having the program actually work in an efficient, useful and secure way.

...Flash?

Yeah, that thingie in which you draw stuff, sprinkle them with a script or two, and with a few click you get something that can be run or embedded in a webpage. The thing HTML 5 supposedly replaced.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#197

Post by _Codemonkeyism » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

State of our industry, being "fan" of something or "not a big fan" of something.

You should not be a fan of a tool, but use the right tool for the job. If Scrum is the right tool, use Scrum. If Kanban is the right tool, use Kanban. If Six Sigma is the right tool, use Six Sigma. If waterfall is the right tool, use waterfall.

Second, if you can't use a tool, don't use it (I've seen companies using Scrum with excellent requirements engineering, rearchitecture/refactoring, headroom, ...)

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#198

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #101

nutheracc wrote: post #69

NoEstimates: http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/the-noestimates-moveme...

That's a great idea if you don't have any customers or constraints. In the real world, there are externalities that have an impact and require some estimation. Maybe we have to provide new support materials to customers, or finish a contract with a third-party data provider, or change our infrastructure. It's exceptionally hard to do some of these things without being able to make commitments of some kind. Estimates…

If you could count the joists and studs and shingles needed for a computer project, sure you could make good estimates. But more often there's no architect drawing at all. Just some desired behaviors. "How long to build a house that will bring joy and success to the family that lives there?" You can understand when the builder hesitates to name a price, given a spec like that.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#199

Post by wott » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

cechner wrote: post #3

cechner wrote: post #2

Scrum proponents (a label I would tentatively apply to myself) would tell you that 'you're doing it wrong' but unfortunately a point-by-point reply to this article would detract from the general problem here: Scrum is intended to be the straightest line towards measuring your real progress on a project, and not much else If youre working on a project where it is important that you have as-accurate-as-is-realistic an…

oh and I have attended some of those expensive Scrum 1-week courses and saw the darker side of that community - it definitely has a cult following that give it a bad name, but I've been to similar conventions around design patterns, object-oriented and (to a lesser degree) functional programming so I think that the community problem is not particular to Scrum.

The problem is communities.

Re: Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

#200

Post by dimino » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:44 PM UTC

Scrum definitely sucks, but it sucks less than most of the other options.

Kind of like democracy.

If you don't like meetings, planning, or giving estimates, you probably don't like working on software for a living, because I simply don't know how to build software without meeting with other people, coming up with an idea, and telling the people giving me money when I hope to be done.