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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#231

Post by dilyevsky »

theshrike79 wrote: post #214
dilyevsky wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also in the latter way you can easily have a turnover in the team without any major hassles, you can always find mid-tier coders. And turnover you will have! =) Note that you just ballooned the cost probably 3-4x compared to keeping the team small and strong. And that is how we got to this zombiecorn land we see today. Also consider this - hiring a large team of bozos is a one-way street. You will likely never be a…

One thing to remember is that every superstar used to be a mid-tier coder. This is not an YA novel where talent is decided at an arbitrary time and that's the lane you'll hold until you retire. =) When you hire people straight off school or "mid tier" people, you can help them grow to be better and reap the benefits. If everyone will just hire the "top tier talent", their prices will inflate and the pool of top tier…

There’s a pretty big difference between carefully seeding up and coming talent and deliberately hiring 40 mids like some folks are suggesting here to build their scrum teams or whatever. There aint going to be no growth here.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#232

Post by throwuxiytayq »

theshrike79 wrote: post #107
idlewords wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a No True Scotsman argument. The guy enumerated a list of ways scrum failed in his experience; it's always interesting to hear honestly about failure modes from people who have actually used something a lot in their work.

The same thing works the other way. People see and experience shit Scrum and then they No True Scotsman it to mean that all Scrum must be shit. It seems to me that most American software companies use Cargo Cult Scrum. They basically take the terms and maybe read a blog about the processes and just wing it from there. The only way an Agile/Scrum process works if you bring in a consulting company that's expensive enou…

Sheesh, no wonder everyone is doing it wrong.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#233

Post by fendy3002 »

kelnos wrote: post #227
fendy3002 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If CEO can hire a 100$ scrum master to save a 1000$ failing team, it's much cheaper than hiring 2000$ successful team. That's probably what they're thinking

I don't think that's true at all. If there's time-to-market pressure (for example), then you really want that $2000 team to deliver on time. "Saving" the $1000 failing team with a $100 scrum master may not be good enough. Also, please at least acknowledge that your numbers are completely made up and may have no basis in reality. It might be a $1000 team only if they deliver on time, but the overages might push that t…

Saying that doesn't mean I agree with what I say, you know.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#234

Post by dilyevsky »

namaria wrote: post #162
dilyevsky wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also in the latter way you can easily have a turnover in the team without any major hassles, you can always find mid-tier coders. And turnover you will have! =) Note that you just ballooned the cost probably 3-4x compared to keeping the team small and strong. And that is how we got to this zombiecorn land we see today. Also consider this - hiring a large team of bozos is a one-way street. You will likely never be a…

All you said is true. But the number of talented programmers is very limited and concentrated. And they are quite expensive. Most companies and teams have to go the structured approach with whatever local mediocrity they can hire.

I disagree I guess and they are not as expensive as 4-5x more mids.

> Most companies and teams have to go the structured approach with whatever local mediocrity they can hire.

Yes most companies fail

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#235

Post by superfrank »

lispm wrote: post #166
superfrank wrote: post #102

I have a lot of issues with scrum and I think twitter post and the comments here touch on a lot of them, but one of my biggest annoyances with the whole thing that I hardly ever hear anyone mention is the term "sprints". If you asked a marathon runner how to run a marathon, they're going to tell you things like run slower, make sure you conserve energy, and control your pace. They're not going to tell you to mentally…

If the word (sprint) is a problem, then change it. Call it "iteration", "segment", whatever. Taking a 500km bicycle ride from one place to another, you surely will plan the thing as segments. I would plan days and see where I can reach milestones: a city, a place to stay, a sight-seeing place, a mountain top, a ferry, a destination... A software development project of several months is not a Marathon. I've run a Mara…

I agree that a word is just a word and it can easily be changed. That's why I called it a minor issue. I think my issue is more that if we have a framework where part of the framework is named after something that is not unsustainable long term, it makes me question the goals and intent of the people who created it. I have to ask myself, "are we using this in an unintended way".

It's like if you came to my house and asked for a towel and I went, "oh yeah, use my butt towel". Just because it's called a butt towel doesn't mean it's actually got anything to do with a butt, but you're probably going to be a bit uncomfortable until you understand why I'm calling it that.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#236

Post by tetrisgm »

Over the past ten years, I've made sure our team's rely on scum and agile less and less. We still have a minimal board, and standups, but that's it. No extra meetings. No definition of done. No stories. We just talk when needed. In practice, any work done to define in the card is likely to slightly change when there's new knowledge anyway. We find our approach substantially more flexible, agile, and stress free.

One of our engineers today said that he felt bad that some of the cards were on the board for so long. He was self conscious about some false sense of velocity that was expected. I told him it's just a page on the internet with some text on it. Scrum, with its frameworks and ideology and self righteous way of looking like a way to be performant and sophisticated, is just some words on a page and some performative meetings. Poor guy was getting distracted by that.

The goal of scrum is to let middle management and non coders bring Science(c) to the organization. There's a culture fostered by executives, consultants, that posits that engineers don't understand what to work on and waste time, therefore we need this stuff to run a tighter ship. As it happens, it'd also what justifies middle management's jobs.

Scrum is good at tightening things that work, or making work feel predictable. A lot of growth scenarios or experimentation aren't predictable, so it becomes more like a broken dogma that serves the needs of the bureaucracy.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#237

Post by ipaddr »

psunavy03 wrote: post #45
ipaddr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a scrum master and feel personally slighted that the popularity is slipping?

And there's the typical internet argument! "I disagree with you and here's why!" "I'm sorry that you're personally offended. See, you disagreed with my pure, sweet, logical opinion, which means you must be personally offended, because no REASONABLE person would disagree with me. And because you're offended, you operate on emotions, as opposed to my high-and-mighty self, who operates on pure, sweet logic. Thus I am ri…

Are you a scrum master? Going to school for it? What is your experience with scrum? Have you tried it? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#239

Post by amai »

Scrum and agile always fails if your company has a finance department. The finance department is never agile an will demand numbers every quarter. They don't care about your sprints. They want a plan for the next quarter and don't care about your sprints or your t-shirt estimates of your Kanban backlog. Unfortunately since they have the money the needs of the finance departments always win over all agile processes you have in place.

No agile book or manifesto ever mentions this issue, because there simply is no solution for it.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#240

Post by replyifuagree »

fendy3002 wrote: post #73
intelVISA wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No love for Scrum but this is the more likely explanation. A good team that runs itself? Ofc it doesn't need Ten Scrum Masters to deliver value. Now, the real question is why leadership tries to salvage failing teams with Scrum? Save the wasted money, use it to hire top talent instead... easy.

If CEO can hire a 100$ scrum master to save a 1000$ failing team, it's much cheaper than hiring 2000$ successful team. That's probably what they're thinking

Sadly the $1000 team doesn't get saved by the $100 scrum master though.

You are 100% right that legacy management falls for the SCRUM sales pitch.

At one company I worked at the scrum salesman basically bullied the executive team by saying "You don't want to be the last company to adopt scrum do you?!!??!"

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