What i don’t like most about scrum is the sprints. Doesn’t matter if it’s one or two weeks long, we never have a successful sprint, the velocity chart looks like random numbers, and we spend hours on debating what the story points really mean. Sprints are artificial deadlines that don’t really make any sense, developers don’t care, business people don’t care. A project i could complete in a month will take at least three months, because of the processes we have to follow. Instead of refactoring and thinking about overall design i have to worry about getting the task done by the end of the sprint.
Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
91–100 of 223 posts
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#92In the one place I saw Scrum work really well it wasn't because of scrum we succeeded it was the amazingly talent team that groked their goals and understand how to build software well. The complete lack of an enforcer manager was a huge win, being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering, that worked really well. They executed well despite s…
"being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering," Lucky you however, letting 'raw' Engineers interface with customers is usually a disaster. Engineers build tech, the company builds products, and they are very, very different things. A lot of pieces in there - support, training, docs, price , risk, leverage, IP, know-how, relationship managem…
You need the right customers. We were really lucky the lady in charge of the business team learnt enough of how the development worked to sit in that middle ground between her team of experts and ours to guide the direction well. I would say she and our engineering principle were what made things work well. If you are working with generic customers out there in the world then its much harder to utilise customer focussed requirements.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ja I've seen teams without them (10x, brilliant loner, call them what you want). The times the teams are without that sort of talent(just talking pure problem solving ability here)... was the times the teams, product and company was also just that. mediocre/not-inspiring/meh. And they weren't solving a hard problems ! If we were to take this to the extreme. Where do you slot in someone like Jeff Dean ? Are you going…
What's with all the ellipses? Really makes it hard to understand what you're saying. Almost all of them should be replaced with simple commas or full stops.
agreed... and fixed
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember we had a discussion about 10x developers a while ago and how some developers are perceived as moody divas. My guess would be that the 10x-ers have are independent enough from any given employer that they can reject Scrum even if everyone else has to follow it. And later on, their ability to work on their own terms is what then makes them 10x more productive than the poor scrummers.
You just gotta trust that your top guys know what they're doing and let them do it. It's how Lockheed let Kelly Johnson run the Skunkworks however he wanted to. Johnson delivered the impossible again and again, and Lockheed was smart enough to not interfere.
I'm not entirely convinced that Johnson's example generalizes well. He might just represent an instance of survivorship bias.
Some people can be brilliant at something while at the same time being toxic, with the toxicity ultimately winning. Kalanick at Uber might be an example.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#95The thing I personally see that corrupts Scrum the most are external stakeholders. They're usually applying time pressures and defining work items to be worked on. The team then has no ownership and no control, resulting in an unhappy and unmotivated team that's constantly disappointed with itself for not delivering and often isn't really invested in what's being asked of them.
If you want teams to care, they need to own it. When teams care, things happen faster. The catch is that you can't make them care about what you want done. You need to treat the team like the "10x rogue developer" giving them freedom to pursue what they want to pursue, steered by the product owner, shielded from external stakeholders. A product owner that mandates as _part_ of a team "we need to do X by y because Bob from marketing wants it" has a losing battle on their hands.
I really think the best person to be prioritising is the leader of the moment. Sometimes it's the strongest Dev, sometimes it'll be the product owner, sometimes it'll be the scrum master, sometimes it'll be a UX designer. It could be anyone, that everyone believes in. The next week/month/quarter it'll naturally be someone different, or maybe it's still that same person, if everyone is on board then there's no issue, right? That's not to say there's should be bitter infighting either, only that everyone should follow the herd. This way, the majority of people believe they're working on the right thing, and social pressures get others pushing in the same direction too.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
>idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. Many of us do believe this. Absolutely. >It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because it takes time and experimentation to come up with the correct way to approach a problem, but if you do it right, you save yourself an incredible amount of time. But on the flip side, if you get it wrong you waste an inc…
I am fine with the small improvements to code part, but I at least want an idea of where I am going. Small improvements to solve the problem? Sure. But I at least want an idea of what the entire problem is, not just the two weeks of problem shards I am given.
Absolutly agree, if you don't know where you are going, how can you possibly move towards it. At the end of every milestone its super important to take a step back and ask, are you on the write track.
If nobody can clearly tell you the end goal, your project management process is not the problem.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#97I work in the public sector of Denmark, and I’m involved with both developing and procuring solutions. We have quite a lot of them, around 300 for our 10.000 employees, and from a buyers perspective things like Scrum and agile rarely makes a lot of sense. It’s down to the old triangle of time, features, money, which agile and through it scrum mandates at least one has to be flexible. Only that’s now how you buy softw…
> We have quite a lot of them, around 300 for our 10.000 employees, and from a buyers perspective things like Scrum and agile rarely makes a lot of sense
> No one is going to give you an unlimited amount of money of time for an uncertain amount of features
In a customer project I worked on recently, the consultancy I work at had a contract based on the number of story points - something like, "we will deliver 200 story points in phase 1". Now, because a story point is a relatively nebulous thing, there is of course a lot of room on both sides to fiddle things, but actually the customer was pretty happy with it.
The actual scrum teams were completely miserable, but that's a separate point altogether :)
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Planning could be far more accurate if we just got a proposed task list a day before planning. Why don't you work that in to your process. It's called Agile for a reason.
Why don't they put it into Agile books? They're called books for a reason. Snark aside, that's the difficulty. The fix for everything in Agile is - instead of adopting some sensible practice (that could actually have been discussed in academic literature), have an argument about this with your team members, maybe they will get it. It's a return to medieval times, where all the expertise was just the experience of the…
I think the value of Agile is that everybody is different, and every problem posses unique challenges. You don't want to just follow some process in a book and expect it to work with your unique group of developers and designers, or for the unique problem you are trying to solve.
You could start with something suggested in a book. But you need to be ready to adjust your process when you identify when something is not working.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#99Once there was great scrum master, no managers, felt like a team, no missed sprints.
Once there were no managers, team crumbled in internal politics but was bearable.
Once there was micromanagement, all fails to developers, all prizes for management, each sprint failed, that was hell.
Re: Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
#100We use Scrum at work and I have to say, I am pretty annoyed by it. I think it is fundamentally rooted in the idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. And from this come all its micromanagement failure modes (which there are plenty). I think in reality, SW development done right is nothing like that. It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because i…
> Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) This has benefits and downsides. One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload. On the other, I agree. Why are we pulling estimates of effort out of thin air? Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen? Planning…
If you have no idea what the task list is before the planning meeting I'd say you definitely need to get your process changed. That's astonishing.