Scrum is a process for large companies to force some group consistency across their 1000's of developers. Think of it as the minimum viable group behaviour. Naturally talented and effective team oriented developers know what to do naturally and don't require the explicit framework.
Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
211–220 of 223 posts
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am definitely a "moody diva", I think because daily standup in particular forces me to admit more failures than I would have to otherwise (you need to fail before you succeed). And it's ultimately pointless and more stressing for everyone, because lot of these failures get resolved the next day. In some sense, standup is a nocebo, a mood killer for me. I am there, in the morning, ready for work, my mind firing up,…
Some standups, I feel like I'm back in primary school doing show and tell, as I get regaled with tales of whatever meeting someone had (even better when several people feel the need to bring up the meeting that literally the whole team attended), or their progress on a completely unrelated project/feature which may as well have been what they had for dinner last night, for all relevance it has to me. They do have the…
> A team member may encounter something they're having difficulty with that another developer has encountered and solved in the past. You might want to share a problem you encountered or findings that are relevant to others.
IME this has been the biggest boon of standups. If they are kept short, and further conversation is done outside the meeting, they are a good way of matching your problems to other people on your team who may have a solution.
> Sometimes I feel like a meeting helps ideas flow better though.
I generally prefer when protracted conversation/problem solving is taken up between the concerned parties after the meeting, as otherwise the meeting drags on for everyone else who doesn't really need to know about your particular issue. But I do definitely agree with your assessment that "actual verbal conversation[s]" are better for me with regard to figuring a problem out.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#213We use Scrum at work and I have to say, I am pretty annoyed by it. I think it is fundamentally rooted in the idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. And from this come all its micromanagement failure modes (which there are plenty). I think in reality, SW development done right is nothing like that. It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because i…
Scrum is being applied like a shiny new hammer to everything that might have seen or heard of nail a once.
The primary reason scrum should be used for software development is when iterating closely with a knowledgeable customer. The pattern basically outsources the discovery of what to build onto the customer - and if the customer can tell what good looks like, shazam! scrum is downright magical!
Guess what, most software teams are isolated from the customer, or the customer/product owner doesn't know what good looks like, so no wonder scrum is getting a bad name as teams struggle to get value out of scrum activities.
There is a reason why teams need to have flexibility to modify their R&D patterns and processes. Without that flexibility you get to do scrum and the results make you wonder if you are doing it wrong.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#214Scrum has its flaws, but even though is marked as a "process framework" and the guide states you should evolve the process to fit your company (it is part of the agile movement), it's considered a big red flag diverging from it even a little, which completely invalidates the "people over processes" part of the manifesto.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#215I interviewed a long time ago at a med tech company in Boston where Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of scrum, was the CTO (I believe). I had recently been through scrum master training at my current job and was quite keen to see how scrum was applied in the place where the guy who invented it was working. I asked my first interviewer how they used scrum on their team and his answer was that they didn't use scru…
So what did they use? Other than kanban I haven’t heard of anything other than scrum. And that is essentially scrum where you draw issues from the entire stack instead of biweekly choosing a subset of the stack to use.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember we had a discussion about 10x developers a while ago and how some developers are perceived as moody divas. My guess would be that the 10x-ers have are independent enough from any given employer that they can reject Scrum even if everyone else has to follow it. And later on, their ability to work on their own terms is what then makes them 10x more productive than the poor scrummers.
I am definitely a "moody diva", I think because daily standup in particular forces me to admit more failures than I would have to otherwise (you need to fail before you succeed). And it's ultimately pointless and more stressing for everyone, because lot of these failures get resolved the next day. In some sense, standup is a nocebo, a mood killer for me. I am there, in the morning, ready for work, my mind firing up,…
Would moving the standup to sometime where you are naturally interrupted, e.g. just before or after lunch, work better for you or is it the nature of the standup itself that's the problem?
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#217The only right way to do 'great engineering' is by not having any middle management. The only right way to do great engineering, is by first asking what we ought to be engineering, not re-implementing the same shit over and over again, like we do web frameworks in every new language. Great engineering is completely unrelated to scrum. It is only in the delusional mind of a middle manager that his existence and though…
While "middle manager" is often nowadays a negative term, having a good manager between yourself and the upper management/customer can be a godsend. They can act as a bullshit filter, they can deal with bureaucratic busywork, they can get you whatever resources you need, fight for more funding/people for your team, help out with HR stuff and so on. You need these people so you can get on with "great engineering".
Those people should not be paid nearly as much as the actual value producers.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a useful discussion happens during a standup the people discussing can just leave and let the others continue the standup without them. There is no point in being strict with these things.
Agreed. I was just curious about why, specifically, the parent poster never schedules follow-ups. If the discussion in question was actually valuable, it seems like they would want to pick it up later (or use your approach of just forking off immediately. I look at those two things are being approximately equivalent).
> can just leave and let the others continue
That can be hard -- many / some people would be worried it'd be impolite to leave and in a way say "the things you're talking about aren't interesting to me".
And they'll stay and feel frustrated, in silence.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let's have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed. If somebody complains that Scrum is bad because e.g. every day you have to update management at stand-up (as mentioned in TFA), but the Scrum Guide, every book ever written on scrum, the websites of the Scrum Alliance and scrum.org, and more or less every advocate of scrum great and small, states explicitly that this…
Despite what every book says, despite having three agile coaches run workshops with the team, despite this issue being specifically addressed with everyone involved, and being acknowledged as wrong, it still becomes the purpose of the standup . No amount of "this is not the purpose of a standup" and "you're doing it wrong" can fix human nature. Management is mostly interested in progress and timelines, and will give…
> it still becomes the purpose of the standup.
Also, the meetings are a bit useless for the developers -- they can just chat directly instead, and look in Trello/sth to see what the others are doing.
So the for oneself most meaningful thing to do, during the meetings, is to impress the managers / others listening?
Since the meetings barely hello with getting real work done anyway
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am definitely a "moody diva", I think because daily standup in particular forces me to admit more failures than I would have to otherwise (you need to fail before you succeed). And it's ultimately pointless and more stressing for everyone, because lot of these failures get resolved the next day. In some sense, standup is a nocebo, a mood killer for me. I am there, in the morning, ready for work, my mind firing up,…
> and then these design decisions are vetted (and possibly changed) by everyone in an open discussion But don’t you dare try to have an open discussion at a stand up meeting. The moment a useful discussion starts the scrum “master” will tell you to schedule a separate meeting to discuss it. Honestly, that just kills the flow of communication. I have never scheduled a separate meeting to continue the discussion. We ju…
This. When I structured the standups for our own team, I budgeted 15 minutes for updates and 15 minutes for open conversation.
The result has worked almost exactly as intended: there's breathing room to discuss issues or ideas that come up in the course of conversation, but discipline around keeping those conversations brief enough to stay on the rails.
IMO at previous companies getting told "this isn't the time for that discussion" really frustrated me. As the OP stated, these conversations never happened, and it's healthier to allow some time and space for people to talk off-script when they're all meeting together.