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Scrum is fragile, not Agile

dennisweyland.net

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Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#231

Post by coldtea »

wpietri wrote: post #189
tootie wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum is badly misunderstood and maybe that's a failing in and of itself but it's really a victim of the developers who sold it as a magical process. Scrum simply can't be implemented as a purely developer process. The backlog exists as a rolling contract between dev and product owners and sponsors. The most common failure I see is when project leadership agrees to a fixed scope and timeline then tries to execute in…

I have almost never seen Scrum sold as magical by developers . Executives? Yes. Consultants? Yes. But developers? I agree that fixed-scope contacts cause a lot of problems for Agile approaches. However, they also cause a lot of problems for non-Agile approaches. If I have to deal with supposedly fixed-scope situation, I'm going with and Agile approach. There are two basic cases. One is that scope is truly fixed (whic…

>I have almost never seen Scrum sold as magical by developers. Executives? Yes. Consultants? Yes. But developers?

In many places, especially smaller ones, project managers are also developers (or lead developers etc), and they often drink the Scrum kool-aid.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#232

Post by coldtea »

saagarjha wrote: post #165
mixmastamyk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How could it possibly take that long? How do you not know how long it will take?" Well, if they really said that, you can just dismiss the comment as incompetent. A witty retort may be in order if a non-technical manager is in earshot, e.g.: "How long would it take for you to earn a green belt in karate?" "Hmm, what does a green belt entail?" "Exactly, you don't even know what you don't know, yet."

> A witty retort may be in order I don't think this will score you a lot of points.

Depends. Are we talking self-esteem/dignity points, or good doggie/loyalty points?

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#233

Post by goatinaboat »

beachy wrote: post #15
wpietri wrote: post #12

He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption. I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable. I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies have other priorities than being effective, so the…

Scrum won out IMO because it's an awesome word and conjures up subliminal images of brute force pushing obstacles out of the way, bringing success to the team. Execs can relate to it without even knowing what it is.

When I hear the word scrum I am always reminded that my school stopped playing Rugby because a kid in the next town got his back broken, in a scrum. So from then on we played football (soccer) in Rugby kit, until eventually all the kids had grown out of it, or left. Similarly, if you sprint and sprint and sprint you will collapse from exhaustion.

I often wonder if they picked these words because they knew nothing at all about sports, of if there is a coded warning in them...

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#234

Post by cuillevel3 »

The SCRUM guide is not long, it's 19 pages in a large font. If I remember correctly it does not even mention a lot of the processes which make up SCRUM for many teams.

However the article is not wrong, it's too easy to make SCRUM all about the process, without changing anything about interactions, developer empowerment and feedback cycles.

I think the SCRUM doesn't do a good job of putting limits on what is still agile SCRUM and what is not. Maybe because it's written in such a friendly language.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#235

Post by reinhardt »

coldtea wrote: post #232
saagarjha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A witty retort may be in order I don't think this will score you a lot of points.

Depends. Are we talking self-esteem/dignity points, or good doggie/loyalty points?

I'd guess career-progression points, or even keep-getting-a-paycheck points at worst.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#236

Post by rofo1 »

yibg wrote: post #202

The best place I've worked at as a developer essentially had no process. It's also the place I really saw the benefits of having good managers (or a project manager, but here the manager took this role). Essentially the "process" was: - Someone gets an idea to do something, e.g. PMs wants to add a feature. - The manager (maybe with the help of a dev) figures out which teams need to be involved (e.g. dependencies). -…

Absolutely. I have nearly identical experience.

We are better off building over-all engineers that know what they are doing, than trying to catch up with the latest shiny thing (Scrum, Agile, Waterfall, Kanban, ...Jesus Christ)

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#237

Post by makach »

uh oh, is this the one article that will make people go "A-HA, told you so?" #confirmation-bias

and, I never saw so much interpretation of what something should be as with Agile.

not everyone is entitled to say or mean something, that includes myself and this post.

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#238

Post by HelloNurse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #107
barrkel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum is iterated waterfall. By iterating faster, inaccurate estimation is shown up sooner. On the other hand, developers are treated like cogs in a feature factory, munching through backlog items fed to them by product managers. I think it works well enough, for a few years. I don't think it's sustainable - the blinkers of "sprints" encourage growth of tech debt because nobody has an eye on the future and Product wo…

> Scrum is iterated waterfall. No, it isn't. Iterated waterfall is at least as old as the first paper discussing waterfall, but while scrum mandates interations, it doesn't mandate much about how work is done in the iterations, and specifically does not mandate the process steps associated with waterfall; further, it emphatically rejects the role separations and handoffs associated with waterfall during the iteration…

> Tech debt should manifest in reduced velocity which should be noticed, taken as a signal of a process defect, and addressed in the Scrub Team’s various inspection and process adjustment points.

This process adjustment usually means "sorry about your vacation" and/or "you aren't doing enough overtime".

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#239

Post by verinus »

barrkel wrote: post #46
drngdds wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're asked to deliver a feature that would take 4 weeks to implement without tech debt in two weeks. Well there's your problem. How is that inherent to scrum?

Because it's a sprint . You've got a finish line and you're racing towards it. Businesses don't function without prediction, and refactoring gets cut before roadmapped features. If feature development is a bottleneck in company growth, debt will grow, quickly.

imho a problem with the implementation of SCRUM, but not necessarily restricted to SCRUM.

In a perfect SCRUM world you could not be forced to implement this in a time not of your own estimate. A feature that is so big that it takes more than a few days to implement has to be split...but well we all know how this plays our in reality most of the times...

Re: Scrum is fragile, not Agile

#240

Post by hnlmorg »

anon1m0us wrote: post #32
brightball wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum won out because it was waterfall in disguise. Commitments and sprints become terribly destructive over time.

Waterfall was coined by a paper discussing why waterfall wasn't a good way to do software projects. You aren't wrong, either. I found Scrum to be a series of waterfalls that weren't well thought out. "Iterative Design" essentially meant, "We aren't sure what the button should do exactly, but we know we need it there and it kinda has to do this and we'll figure the rest out for the next iteration." That caused so many…

For every example of scrum operating badly there are examples of scrum working well. The common denominator in all of those situations - good and bad - is the project and middle/upper management.
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