I don’t believe in sprints
robinrendle.com
I don’t believe in sprints
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Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#2I 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 are inundated with menial bureaucracy, and each attempt to reform it within bureaucractic systems has simply lead to the red tape being rearranged. I think this stems from our hesitancy to have more horizontal models of ogranisation.
[1] - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the...
[2] - https://bullshit.ist/bullshit-jobs-how-our-modern-bureaucrac...
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#3I agree with the title, but the article fails to deliver on the essence - saying "points are bureaucracy, backlog is bureaucracy" does not really say what is the problem, it does not explain what's an alternative to backlog that helps to solve the same problem (visibility of the work to be done, predictability, etc.)
For me the biggest problem with sprints is that they force a continuous flow into discrete boxes. An extreme example I've seen was when as a mid-level developer I was told not to pick up any new tasks, because everything we start needs to be finished by the end of the sprint, and if I start a new task now, testers won't be able to complete it before the end of the sprint.
Of course it was an abuse of the concept, but I hope you see the point - we shouldn't try to start every sprint with an empty board, because software development is continuous, and the fear of tasks "spilling" to next sprint, which I've seen multiple times, is just ridiculous.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#4(side note: there are no crappy teams, only crappy managers)
is patently false unless the manager also has the power to add/remove people from their team or fire people.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#5No post body was provided.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#6This 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 that is the tradeoff. Plus: people actually seldomly take the optimum routes in the first place.
Nobody has to like it, this is probably not the best method and maybe it's not even good. But the author misses the point completely.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#7I 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 don't know that 'hesitancy' is the right word. It's just fundamental that people in power use it to seek more power. Even a small initial power imbalance will eventually lead to a large intractable one. Happens at pretty much at all scales of social (political, economic, etc) interactions.
The only solution I see is to set up systems that make power accumulation more difficult coupled with a constant struggle to rebalance when it inevitably lopsided.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#8Eh. If you get ahold of a bucket of true geniuses, best thing you can do is not even give them goals and just feed them until Nobel prize/Manhattan Project level work surfaces. As you go down the scale, crisper and crisper goals are needed. This isn't an absolute either; I've been both the smartest man in the room, bogged down by scrum poker and similar inanities, on the one hand, and (elsewhere) someone with a vague understanding of the work needing some supervision to even add value to the team.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#9Article seems more about management and tooling than anything else. No amount of frameworks or toolsets will solve a bad/broken management style. Agree with the other comment here about forcing cts into discrete flow. I've always seen sprints / scrum as a babystep to a kanban based method rather than the end goal from an operations perspective.
But a bad management style would still trump this.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#10I agree with the title, but the article fails to deliver on the essence - saying "points are bureaucracy, backlog is bureaucracy" does not really say what is the problem, it does not explain what's an alternative to backlog that helps to solve the same problem (visibility of the work to be done, predictability, etc.) For me the biggest problem with sprints is that they force a continuous flow into discrete boxes. An…
Why do you need visibility and/or predictability?
I would say Steve Yegge's classic Good Agile, Bad Agile gives the answer - Kanban (or, more informally, a work queue).