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I don’t believe in sprints

robinrendle.com

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Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#361

Post by robertlagrant »

debrice wrote: post #300
hurril wrote: post #6

This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…

Yes, sprints on paper are what you describe, but in reality, they rarely ensure deliveries or predictability, they even tend to hinder productivity as they narrow the body of work of a whole team. Think about it, after a week, what is usually the distribution of work of your team? For me, it was always very unbalanced, where people where working overtime and others (best case scenario) would be looking for some work…

> backlogs are by far just a list of the things you wont do

Scrum even has a ceremony for fixing this: backlog refinement.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#362

Post by intrasight »

I read as "I don't believe in spirits". Then replacing as I read was somewhat humorous.

"Spirits don’t help organize things, they’re not a useful organizing tool"

"Good teams don’t need spirits to get good work done."

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#363

Post by robertlagrant »

groestl wrote: post #232
jibe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d go further, sprints are defensive for devs. Don’t bother me or tell me to do something new during a sprint. I’m doing the work I said I’d do, leave me alone until the sprint is overs.

As a senior dev I hate this. Of course I'm going to drop everything, if what I do stops making sense on an org level. Why would I do anything else.

Sounds like you've had an awesome career with no experience of people slamming unnecessary work into your workload, or trying to design in detail things that won't be implemented for 6 months, and will have been redesigned 5 times in that time. For everyone else, sprint backlog is a useful tool that you decide when you should violate it, and by exception only.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#364

Post by robertlagrant »

nightpool wrote: post #231
ngrilly wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear.app is an example of a startup that "successfully launched using agile" and focused on "releasing features to production", while working with 2 weeks cycles (not "sprints"): https://linear.app/method

Right, this is exactly what GP is talking about. When you prioritize "doing predictable sprints" and a stable point velocity over releasing features to production, you reduce your team's throughput and productivity. When you prioritize shipping features to production over "predictable sprints", then things can be successful. You're proving GPs point, not contradicting it.

You're contrasting two different types of thing. If part of something being "done" is deploying it to production, then it will be useful to have the "deploy to production" bit of it managed by a sprint process that tries to account for all the work needed to do something.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#365

Post by robertlagrant »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #147
hurril wrote: post #6

This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…

Nice way of arguing: “this is nothing but a strawman” - and 0 counter-arguments, 0 quotes, 0 attempts to be polite. Brilliant.

I suppose OP will be pleased with your comment. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and all that.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#366

Post by debrice »

robertlagrant wrote: post #361
debrice wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sprints on paper are what you describe, but in reality, they rarely ensure deliveries or predictability, they even tend to hinder productivity as they narrow the body of work of a whole team. Think about it, after a week, what is usually the distribution of work of your team? For me, it was always very unbalanced, where people where working overtime and others (best case scenario) would be looking for some work…

> backlogs are by far just a list of the things you wont do Scrum even has a ceremony for fixing this: backlog refinement.

I have never been in a company that was able to deal with backlog. Albeit I have not worked at all companies, there's got to be some that successfully deal with backlog... but how many?

Is Scrum a solution that really works, or merely a great concept?

I agree with and swear by the agile manifesto (it's really amazing) but IMHO, all of its byproduct methodologies fall short in the real world, with no exception.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#367

Post by robertlagrant »

marcosdumay wrote: post #350
pnut wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how whenever I've done kanban, top tech debt items always are eternally pushed down to #5 or 6 in the backlog, never to see the light of day. I have my criticisms for sure, but sprints give more discretion to the teams to carve out space for multiple types of priorities held in balance, and lock that ratio in for a period of time.

Do not let formal debt and improvements compete on the same ranking. Either do 2 of this, 1 of that, or have separated time slots, or whatever. But separate them.

Yep. We used to dedicate 20% of story points to tech debt, when we had quite a lot of it.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#368

Post by marcosdumay »

kwanbix wrote: post #28
BirAdam wrote: post #13

Personally, I never liked agile. I like to get a description of a problem. Prototype. Take that to that customer and ask for feedback. Iterate. QA. QA. QA. Release. Thing is, much like governments, these models all fall short because people aren’t great. I think that if agile isn’t working for a team they should try another method, and if agile does work for a team that’s fantastic. People, imho, shouldn’t blindly fo…

> Personally, I never liked agile. I like to get a description of a problem. Prototype. Take that to that customer and ask for feedback. Iterate. QA. QA. QA. Release. That is agile for me. What is agile for you then?

Well, this is the process IBM consultants were selling around when Agile started to grow.

Anyway, Agile has that one principle that is focusing on people, not process... You can make any process agile.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#369

Post by commandlinefan »

hurril wrote: post #6

This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…

> they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries

No, they're a tool to get the illusion of more predictable deliveries. As always, comforting lies are more welcome than harsh truths.

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