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Scrum is a cancer

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Re: Scrum is a cancer

#331

Post by throwawaysleep »

baz00 wrote: post #292
idkyall wrote: post #273

I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter. But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings. Scrum, imo, exists so that management and busines…

The meetings are good. You're getting paid during them. I managed to customise my bike, plan two international adventures, run a side business and do a year of a degree in pointless meetings in the last 5 years!

Yep. I have come to love Scrum for the dysfunction it provides as a remote employee. I can sit in the background and do other things while not being expected to achieve anything.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#332

Post by black_13 »

baz00 wrote: post #287
lpapez wrote: post #274

In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…

Ah yes the defence: "The process failed because you didn't have enough project managers on board" No the process failed because it was fucking shit and everyone went somewhere else. The only good thing heavy processes are for are propping up employment statistics.

[dead]

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#333

Post by tabtab »

Many of these management techniques require a well-run shop to work well. They are not forgiving of riff raff and institutional dysfunction, and may even magnify dysfunction. So yes, they CAN work under ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are too rare, especially for non-IT domains who don't understand & value IT management.

Borrow the best fitting ideas from each methodology, but don't obsess on them.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#334

Post by l33t7332273 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #318
notjoemama wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever seen the movie Office Space? There’s a bit about “TPS reports” where multiple managers individually correct the main character on a new cover sheet. I’ve experienced that myself. The movie portrays it comedically but IRL it’s kind of a demoralizing experience. A bit soul crushing actually.

Office space is actually accurate once you replace TPS reports with Status reports/JIRA tickets/Performance reports/Incident reports etc. The amount of dancing required for the sake of management in this industry is just insane.

I think “TPS report” is actually meaningless so it’s supposed to be swapped in for whatever is relevant to the viewer.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#335

Post by bitwize »

idkyall wrote: post #273

I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter. But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings. Scrum, imo, exists so that management and busines…

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. Tell him what he's won, Johnny!

Enlightenment came to me when I realized that companies only adopt Agile for reasons that benefit executives and management, not developers, to wit: fine-grained observability and direct control over the SDLC itself. It's really a game of Mornington Crescent: the team pretends to be playing one game when they're actually playing a different sort of game.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#336

Post by _jal »

bitwize wrote: post #303
lpapez wrote: post #274

In one of my previous projects I lead a team of 5 talented and creative people and we did truly agile programming: everyone helped each other, asynchronous meets as needed, spontaneous pair programming, direct access to the customer (who also happened to be technical people with a clear picture in mind)... Truly a joy of a team to lead, because they really lead themselves :) However, the management insisted that we a…

Real Scrum has never been tried.

Scrum can never fail, only be failed.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#337

Post by wkat4242 »

I totally agree with you, but I would add "for me".

I absolutely hate guidelines and processes and methodologies. I'm totally not a team player either. I need to have my own responsibilities. As ISTP personality these things are totally contrary to my personality.

As such I hate every methodology, of course right now agile (and Scrum as a subset of that) is the darling of every project manager so I hate it. But I do realize it would apply to every other type too.

But anyway I do as I've always done, the absolute minimum to comply with the framework and ignore what I can get away with. Because I get results this is accepted and I'm usually maneuvered into a niche area where I can perform.

For example I always stop logging my mandatory hours in Jira until I get reprimanded and then I stop again a few months later :P

Of course "logging hours in Jira" is our company's idea of "we're agile". We literally don't do anything else :P So it's easy to get away with.

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#338

Post by aidenn0 »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #334
nine_zeros wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office space is actually accurate once you replace TPS reports with Status reports/JIRA tickets/Performance reports/Incident reports etc. The amount of dancing required for the sake of management in this industry is just insane.

I think “TPS report” is actually meaningless so it’s supposed to be swapped in for whatever is relevant to the viewer.

It's actually a real thing that software companies of the time were not unlikely to have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#339

Post by tasubotadas »

I must live in some kind of alternative reality where 80% of teams that I worked with liked Scrum (and I lead tens of teams).

The remaining teams just needed Kanban.

Not sure what everybody else is doing here, but I have seen teams where before we started doing scrum+jira all tasks were coming on Skype and discord, and stakeholders were either micromanaging (programmers managed by non-programmers) or either would forget project for 1 month and would come back to find something delivered that completely missed expectations.

After moving to proper task tracking and clear planning and review rituals, the developer satisfaction went through the roof (before that people were borderline considering quiting)

Re: Scrum is a cancer

#340

Post by lhnz »

The good thing about Scrum is that there are hundreds of little dials that can be modified if you're not getting any value from it.

Due to this level of flexibility, it's always the right approach.

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