Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#221

Post by etripe » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

sergeykish wrote: post #130

js8 wrote: post #34

We 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…

Agile builds on the premise that developers like to build. That we self organize our teams and don't like slackers. Bring transparency for business so it can trust us. Give estimates and accept priorities. Ship from time to time so all can see that process works. It is really easy to screw. I've seen far to many broken versions. Community building is harder than management. And for management there is no benefit besi…

> Bring transparency for business so it can trust us.

The problem is no methodology can make them trust us. Software development is one of the few professions where to the business it's simultaneously "magic" and they think we - as experts - don't know what we're doing. Management is supposed to empower employees and remove obstacles, not disempower and introduce them.

At the same time, there's this illusion that as long as we developers change the way we operate, the rest of the enterprise will magically be affected. A cultural shift without management buy-in won't work.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#222

Post by blargmaster33 » Fri, Jul 03, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

It's ALL ABOUT THE BACKLOG!

A properly groomed backlog with clear requirements/acceptance criterias and guidelines from a software architect will make scrum teams highly efficient!

Having the SA an the PO beeing 2-5 sprints ahead of the team creating a backlog that is ready for the team is a wonderful thing to behold.

A competent SA will with input from the team leader be able to estimate on the feature level allowing reasonable time estimates to be given to the management.

Grooming the backlog is a FULL TIME job.

Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?

#223

Post by richliss » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #170

richliss wrote: post #164

99% of teams are doing Scrum wrong most likely. Scrum has been ruined by many different groups (large consultancies, certification bodies, the misinformed, bloggers etc.) and there is a movement called the Scrum Pattens movement trying to fix the damage and to make it more explicit. If you want to do Scrum properly read “A Scrum Book”. Scrum is not a process it’s process design framework- you start with Scrum as a fr…

> Scrum is not a process it’s process design framework Scrum as defined in The Scrums Guide is a very specifically defined process with a few degrees of freedom, not a process design framework. Now, if your approach was actually Agile (unlike the many groups that do Scrum, either as defined in the Guide or some variation they've cobbled together from other sources and still call “Scrum”, and think that by doing so th…

Part of the reason for the Scrum Patterns movement which is helmed by Jeff Sutherland and Jim Coplien is that the Scrum Guide isn't all that great or clear. There's politics behind that and also attached to how it's changed/updated too.

"Scrum is a framework" immediately follows the "What is Scrum?" heading on https://www.scrumguides.org/ also Jim Coplien directly told me the point of the Scrum framework is to design your own process.

Regarding Kanban - I'm talking about the Kanban used in software development as defined by David J. Anderson and not the token used in manufacturing by Toyota and DJA himself previously wrote "Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process." and "Kanban is a change-management technique that requires making alterations to an existing process".