Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience I've found that scrumm holds back good, fast developers because they focus on only doing their share in a sprint, when they could rocket ahead and be pounding on the backlog. How can you keep your best developers motivated and busy in an agile/scrumm environment?
I think the problem with how agile is "sold" is that it is offered as a prepacked pack of tricks without going to its roots in the queing theory which gives a pretty good reason for a lot of stuff thus leaving the users of the methods partially deaf and blind. But any constraints for projects are better than none and there are worse things than scrum out there...
Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience I've found that scrumm holds back good, fast developers because they focus on only doing their share in a sprint, when they could rocket ahead and be pounding on the backlog. How can you keep your best developers motivated and busy in an agile/scrumm environment?
I think the problem with how agile is "sold" is that it is offered as a prepacked pack of tricks without going to its roots in the queing theory which gives a pretty good reason for a lot of stuff thus leaving the users of the methods partially deaf and blind. But any constraints for projects are better than none and there are worse things than scrum out there...
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rocket ahead folks are often really good at creating technical debt for everyone else. The minority who are really rockets usually burn out early in their career. Used correctly, Agile prevents too much of either type from getting out of control, evening out the peaks and valleys. That's what you want, right? A sustainable pace.
Well said. I've never really looked at it from that perspective, tbh. But you're right, the sprint will keep effort at a sustained pace that the team accepts.
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#24I'm pretty ambivalent about it, because after 25 years of seeing methodologies come and go and come again with the same ideas wrapped in different names I believe projects that succeed, succeed in spite of the chosen methodology, rather than because of it. https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=99bb5987-e08d-4e8...
From my experience I've found that scrumm holds back good, fast developers because they focus on only doing their share in a sprint, when they could rocket ahead and be pounding on the backlog. How can you keep your best developers motivated and busy in an agile/scrumm environment?
It assumes competence. If you are doing scrum with a team that has incompetent and slow developers, you will fail.
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience I've found that scrumm holds back good, fast developers because they focus on only doing their share in a sprint, when they could rocket ahead and be pounding on the backlog. How can you keep your best developers motivated and busy in an agile/scrumm environment?
Scrum focuses on "systemwide" optimization where the "system" is the development of an increment of a software product from concept to completion. Letting a good developer "rocket ahead" optimizes for that developer (localized optimization) but not for the complete system (global optimization). A more "global" optimization of that developer's time and energy, since they can do twice the work in half the time, is to m…
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#26Agile methodology reminds me Asimov's "Reason" (short story), in this case, poor management methods masking the whip behind a ridiculous religion/faith plus some "gamification".
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#27I'm pretty ambivalent about it, because after 25 years of seeing methodologies come and go and come again with the same ideas wrapped in different names I believe projects that succeed, succeed in spite of the chosen methodology, rather than because of it. https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=99bb5987-e08d-4e8...
From my experience I've found that scrumm holds back good, fast developers because they focus on only doing their share in a sprint, when they could rocket ahead and be pounding on the backlog. How can you keep your best developers motivated and busy in an agile/scrumm environment?
If the scope of a sprint is so far out of whack that fast developers are running out of work, then you're misestimating the complexity of deliverables. That sort of thing gets cleared up pretty quickly if it's being managed correctly.
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pretty big fail when people wait until the daily stand-up to communicate. It's better than not communicating at all, of course :-) Either way, daily stand-ups are the worst thing about scrum especially when they are hijacked by PMs. I'm yet to meet a develop who'd look forward to stand-ups. I know they exist somewhere :-) If you are curious about what other people (you don't talk to a lot) are working on then…
There are different types of communication. Some things need to be communicated to the whole team, something you don't want to be doing more than once a day. The one thing about stand ups that I find to be a profound waste of time is reporting what you've done. Isn't that what SVN / GIT / JIRA / etc is for?
SVN/GIT commit messages and Trello/JIRA notifications sent to Slack/Hipchat/YourInternalIrcServer are a great way to aggregate all that information. You can write a Hubot/YourOtherChatBot plugin to gather and summarize that information to make it even easier to track.
By the way, with Hubot you can just say "What everybody is working on?" and it will show you the status for everybody.
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#29Beside other failures, one of a major failures of scrum in real environment (not toy building fun exercise during a scrum course) is failure to address the multi-team environment of real multi-layered projects. A team would usually have dependencies and dependents. In scrum/sprint process a team would try to avoid committing to anything with unsatisfied dependencies which results in that any vertically dependent feature would take a series of sprints, much longer than in non-scrum environment. Add to that complete impossibility of iterations/adjustments on the feature - team A delivers to team B and team B has no chance (until a sprint much much later in the release, i.e. never) to have team A to do an additional iteration upon the delivered changes desired as a result of the actual usage by the team B. It is expectably much worse when it comes to 3 layers/teams (like persistence/framework, business logic, UI).
I specifically asked consultants (during 2 different courses by 2 different consulting companies and at work) about dependencies management in scrum, and blank-facing was their answer. Think about it - software development methodology without addressing inter-component/layer/team dependencies.
Re: Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters
#30I guess the key, like anything else, is not overcommitting, not having interfering management. I suspect that applies to any PM methodology, though.