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I don’t believe in sprints

robinrendle.com

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Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#451

Post by sgu999 »

015a wrote: post #402
bkq wrote: post #2

I get the hate for sprints, and the bastardisation of agile. I think however, the root cause of this is the way in which our society as a whole has been modelled, in a top down manner where control is wrested from the bottom, and perceived control is given to those in between. Each of these articles that make, valid criticisms in my opinion, always makes me think of Bullshit Jobs [1][2]. Most of our lives nowadays ar…

I could not agree more, and I think this take is one of those mental jumps that the pro-Sprint crowd hasn't made yet, but would if they adjust their mental view of how organizations are structured to see it. My long term pet theory (like, next 10-30 years) is: we have this cohort of "kids" growing up now in an environment where there's plenty of money to be made in non-traditional independent ventures; think YouTube,…

(I know I'm late) Even though your pov is very appealing, I think you are a bit optimistic on the ability of workers to unionize, in any kind of setup. I personally don't believe moving all services workers from being employees to being freelancers and independent is going to resolve the imbalance of power in between capital and labour.

Taxis and food delivery are two domains that are worse for workers now than they were before.

It works for tech workers because they can just go somewhere else in a desperate market.

I believe most content creators are by and large submitted to the market, just a different one.

On top of this mall the jobs you mentioned are not for the crowd.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#452

Post by jevyjevjevs »

rob74 wrote: post #112
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…

And because you have sprints, you create lots and lots of small tasks, then focus on them, and then team members forget the "big picture" of how everything should fit together in the end (if they were ever aware of it). And when all of those small tasks are done, you notice that the sum of all those parts is not what you set out to build initially, and you need more time to shape it into something that resembles what…

There are a number of fundamental pieces of Scrum that are needed so all the pieces fit together.

In the Sprint, one of the fundamental elements is having a "Sprint Goal". This allows the team to see the big picture and add/remove work during the sprint to get to that goal.

Without a clear sprint goal, then of course it's easy to loose the essence or "big picture" of what the team is trying to achieve during the sprint.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#453

Post by birthday »

People hate on anything and everything.

It boils down to needing a form of alignment, you can't have team members running around making it up by themselves as they go.

How you achieve alignment and shipping things customers love is irrelevant, just fucking achieve it.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#454

Post by lwhi »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #441
lwhi wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but; no. Developers aren't the only part of a product team. You can't just drop sprints without failing to meet other objectives.

Sprints aren't the only method of agreeing objectives. You can just say "we plan on getting this done by next Wednesday". I've dropped sprints on 2 teams now, and improved our cadence both times.

It's wholly dependent on the larger organisation.

If you need to demo to gain stakeholder approval, and provide ceremonies like retros to disseminate knowledge to a wider team .. these events need scheduling.

Randomly springing these on people without any regularity just won't work in most orgs.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#455

Post by petrocrat »

Kinrany wrote: post #29
samatman wrote: post #22

Rich Hickey has a great joke about sprints, paraphrasing: So how do we run a marathon? That's right, we run a 200m wind sprint! Then another sprint, and another, and pretty soon... Of course no one does this, you'd die! We don't do this in software either, for the same reason. But when we talk about 'sprints' this is what we tell ourselves we're doing.

I liked the joke when I heard it. Reading it now, I'm realizing that "marathon" doesn't fit as a metaphor because we don't know the destination. Orienteering, perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienteering

Orienteering implies there's already a cartographer who made a map for you.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#456

Post by marcus_holmes »

lwhi wrote: post #454
marcus_holmes wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprints aren't the only method of agreeing objectives. You can just say "we plan on getting this done by next Wednesday". I've dropped sprints on 2 teams now, and improved our cadence both times.

It's wholly dependent on the larger organisation. If you need to demo to gain stakeholder approval, and provide ceremonies like retros to disseminate knowledge to a wider team .. these events need scheduling. Randomly springing these on people without any regularity just won't work in most orgs.

sizing all your projects so they neatly fit in 2-week chunks also never works for every dev team I've met. There's always either some slack where the thing took 8 days not 10, or some part of the deliverable gets hacked off into another chunk so it fits.

and, ofc, estimating the time to deliver is impossible, so you end up scheduling a sprint demo that might or might not happen depending on how well the project is going.

Or, as I found, people are perfectly OK with scheduling demos in at short notice and being flexible about their expectations.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#457

Post by rloaderro »

bkq wrote: post #2

I get the hate for sprints, and the bastardisation of agile. I think however, the root cause of this is the way in which our society as a whole has been modelled, in a top down manner where control is wrested from the bottom, and perceived control is given to those in between. Each of these articles that make, valid criticisms in my opinion, always makes me think of Bullshit Jobs [1][2]. Most of our lives nowadays ar…

See also Yishan Wong's "Let process be implemented by those who practice it" http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-process...

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#458

Post by Breza »

bb88 wrote: post #371
xxEightyxx wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about how everything is implemented. I've worked in places where sprints were hard deadlines and there was no acceptable reason for missing said deadlines. We worked 12-15 hour days, including working weekends to try and meet our release schedules. Run into a blocker? Too bad, should have seen it coming during our scrum meetings and follow-up refinements. We engineers had two business analysts, a scrum maste…

> Run into a blocker? Too bad, should have seen it coming during our scrum meetings and follow-up refinements. One of the things that usually happen when they push and push and push for some feature to get rolled out in the next quarter is that it often turns out to be a gigantic flop. Engineers are forced to spend hours they can't get back at the whim of management for something that was a complete and utter failure…

I'm currently studying for the PMP exam, which has made me realize just how far the promise of Agile is from how most people implement it.

Re: I don’t believe in sprints

#459

Post by lwhi »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #456
lwhi wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wholly dependent on the larger organisation. If you need to demo to gain stakeholder approval, and provide ceremonies like retros to disseminate knowledge to a wider team .. these events need scheduling. Randomly springing these on people without any regularity just won't work in most orgs.

sizing all your projects so they neatly fit in 2-week chunks also never works for every dev team I've met. There's always either some slack where the thing took 8 days not 10, or some part of the deliverable gets hacked off into another chunk so it fits. and, ofc, estimating the time to deliver is impossible, so you end up scheduling a sprint demo that might or might not happen depending on how well the project is go…

The project doesn't need to fit into 2-weeks!?

I'd suggest thinking this over, and revisiting.

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