18 ms·

Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum

• cechner 10y ago
  Scrum proponents (a label I would tentatively apply to myself) would tell you that 'you're doing it wrong' but unfortunately a point-by-point reply to this article would detract from the general problem here: Scrum is intended to be the straightest line towards measuring your real progress on a project, and not much else If youre working on a project where it is important that you have as-accurate-as-is-realistic an idea of the size of the project, or more specifically your progress through that project, then I can't see how a methodology could be any simpler. If having a good idea of the size of your project over time and your progress through that project are not very important from a management perspective, the Scrum artefacts will seem like, and will probably in fact be, needless overhead. Scrum is not opinionated about the actual development methodology so claims about how it affects the code that is written are themselves a bad smell IMO.
  • cechner 10y ago
    oh and I have attended some of those expensive Scrum 1-week courses and saw the darker side of that community - it definitely has a cult following that give it a bad name, but I've been to similar conventions around design patterns, object-oriented and (to a lesser degree) functional programming so I think that the community problem is not particular to Scrum.
    • bbarn 10y ago
      Those with the loudest voices simply have the loudest voices, be they right or wrong.
    • wott 10y ago
      The problem is communities.
      • akvadrako 10y ago
        interesting. Do you have an alternative in mind?
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > Scrum is not opinionated about the actual development methodology so claims about how it affects the code that is written are themselves a bad smell IMO. Scrum is actually part of the problem, IMO. I've seen many teams turn scrum into a hammer and treat all future problems as nails. Example problem: The foobar story has failed failed for the third sprint in a row. Likely discussed in retrospective (plausibly good ideas, mind you): - We need to break down stories more before we estimate them. - Or we need to stop underestimating foobar stories. - Or we need to focus on unblocking subtasks related to foobar stories. Probably unconsidered: - The foobar code is a mess and needs to be refactored. - Or the foobar subsystem is too coupled to the Fizzbuzz subsystem. - Or the need for some developer tools to increase productivity in the foobar ecosystem. Since scrum is methodology oriented, methodology is the first tool teams reach for when a problem is encountered. And I see this after team leads make it explicitly OK to discuss technical subjects in retrospectives. I'm not a psychologist, so I can't describe why this phenomenon happens, but I see it regularly.
    • altcognito 10y ago
      All of the items you listed under unconsidered should be brought up by the dev team. If the dev team is uncomfortable bringing them up, then that's probably a sign of friction between the dev team and management, which is really common.
    • the_fury 10y ago
      I've routinely brought up all of the unconsidered comments in retrospectives. Retros are all about making sprints better, and talking about technical problems is integral to that.
  • bhaak 10y ago
    I've seen the "you're doing it wrong" argument so many times (I applied it myself a few times). Scrum is complex and not always possible to follow exactly, so this is to be expected but it makes me wonder, how many successful projects are out there that are following the true Scrum methodology? My guess is that it's a few more than the classic waterfall but I still seem to see far more failure than success stories.
    • blub 10y ago
      The very idea of a one-size-fits-all process is unrealistic IMO. Something will always be customised in practice. Regarding success stories, it might be that process doesn't play such a critical role as long as solid engineering techniques are used and the team is competent.
      • bhaak 10y ago
        If your team is competent and solid engineering techniques are being used, you already have a well working process. Forcing any methodology on this will likely result in a deterioration. All those methodologies are for the less stellar programming teams, to get consistent results from those (also to a lesser degree to make good and bad programmers work well along each other). Because you can't always get the best programmers. If Scrum would only work well with good programmers, it would be next to useless.
    • xorblurb 10y ago
      Successful big waterfall engineering projects where waterfall is actually applied exist. Want to construct a bridge or a rocket, design a microprocessor? You are not going to do that with "stories". It remains to be seen if big Scrum engineering projects where Scrum is actually applied even exist. I can't even think about one on the top of my head. I'm not even sure Scrum is that well defined for us to be able to judge if is correctly applied or not. And it's yet another story to judge if they are successful or not. In the end it does not matter much. The theoretical vision that nobody ever uses has almost no interest if you are concerned with real world efficiencies.
  • dasmoth 10y ago
    >>> Scrum is intended to be the straightest line towards measuring your real progress on a project, and not much else There's slightly more to it than that: it also encodes an assumption that you're working with a single fairly-tightly-integrated group (with synchronisation points at least daily). It's possible that this helps with estimation and scheduling -- it's a lot less clear that it helps get the best outcome in other respects.
    • cechner 10y ago
      I agree, it is often not the best approach. But many situations demand a well defined approach to estimation and although the OP tried to preempt this, he didnt provide an alternative
      • dasmoth 10y ago
        I reckon most experienced coders can cope with estimation when it's justified (i.e. "can we realistically get this done before <specific, real and externally-imposed, deadline>? And if not, is there a useful subset we can manage?"). The bigger problems come when estimation isn't about keeping promises, but rather a part of some form of scientific management aimed at "getting velocity up". There's also something of an uncertainty principle here -- more precision of estimation is possible, at the expense of increased expected timescales (partly due to padding, partly due to picking lower-risk approaches).
        • cechner 10y ago
          if its being used to 'get velocity up' instead of measuring velocity then its not being done right. I personally think estimating projects is one of the most difficult things about this industry. Especially if we're talking about delivering many calendar-months worth of effort for a team , unless its just a variant on some other project[s] the team is well experienced at
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • crdoconnor 10y ago
    >Scrum is not opinionated about the actual development methodology so claims about how it affects the code that is written are themselves a bad smell IMO. Pretty much every kind of deadline driven development ramps up technical debt. Scrum certainly isn't the worst in this respect (developers make their own deadlines, and conscientious ones will build the time in), but the emphasis on commitment and the pressure to deliver at the end of the sprint puts pressure on developers to cut corners. The worst part though, is that the product owner is usually non-technical and will deprioritize stories to clean up technical debt as a result. IMO for any kind of development methodology to work it must have an opinion on technical debt. Scrum doesn't.
    • UK-AL 10y ago
      Sprints are meant to be based on the previous sprints velocity, so any commitment should get smaller and smaller until you can do it without forcing it.
    • cechner 10y ago
      if pressure is ramping up and quality down the sprints arent serving their purpose. One of the few defining characteristics of scrum is that the developers define how much they can achieve, and this estimation is improved over time. If this is not happening there is something else wrong with the culture and Scrum is being used as a scapegoat.
      • crdoconnor 10y ago
        A few defining characteristics of scrum that lead to overly optimistic predictions: * The prediction is made in a meeting while your head is "out of the code". * The prediction is made in a group setting, rendering the decisions more easily subject to peer pressure and groupthink. * The prediction is made up to 2/4 weeks in advance of actually doing the work. * The prediction is made without risk of overshoot attached. Risk is critical metric which scrum conceals. And the main defining characteristic of scrum that leads to pressure, after all of that unwarranted optimism: * The prediction is designated as a commitment.
  • afroisalreadyin 10y ago
    I agree that Scrum is dead simple, but that doesn't mean it delivers sensible estimates, or allows you to get somewhere with less effort than some other methodology. You might end up doing more (and worse) work because Scrum is trying to be too simple and linear, which I argue is the case in the post. But it's simple, I definitely agree. Regarding development: My main point is that Scrum leans towards agile methods such as XP (testing, CI etc), but it also sucks the time necessary to do those things well. The time Scrum takes off of the devs' working hours could much better be spent on those.
  • specialist 10y ago
    "Scrum is intended to be the straightest line towards measuring your real progress on a project, and not much else." More like wandering in the desert, hoping you find the promised land. Been thru scrum master training 3 times, been on many "agile" teams. I've never heard this rationalization. Rather, a common justification for "agile" was you always have a working product. Which might be nice if things worked out that way. Also, PMI style critical path worked just fine for figuring out that "straight line". Scrum and "agile" democratized project management, empowering every poseur to claim expertise and ability. Whereas PMI required real effort to learn and master, Scrum flavored "self help" books can be flipped thru before you finish your coffee and then safely stored in plain sight on a book shelf, never to be touched again, allowing said poseur to claim the daily mutant chaotic dysfunctional mismanagement that they've always done is now "agile".
    • cechner 10y ago
      If you're objecting to people who treat scrum (or any project management tool) as a one-stop-shop that will cure all ills I agree with you, but nobody here is saying that. If you are objecting to defining the scope as small tasks and measuring your progress through that over time, then continually re-evaluating this scope as requirements change, then I think you are not working in an environment that would benefit from this kind of tool. Its just a pragmatic set of guidelines, and objecting to it with such ridiculous vitriol makes you sound as foolish as the people I think you're objecting to.
      • specialist 10y ago
        My goal is to ship products that people will buy and use. Scrum and "agile" has only been an impediment. "with such ridiculous vitriol" Emperor, little boy, no clothes. It's thankless work. In opposition, defenders of Scrum et al use the No True Scotsman's fallacy. Because those of us who have tried and failed are just morons.
    • UK-AL 10y ago
      Considering failure rate of PMI led projects is even higher then agile projects for software. I really wouldn't hold that up that as the way to go.
• mms1973 10y ago
  In my opinion, the good thing about Scrum is that you can tweak the rules to fit your needs, aka, "Scrum in name only". The daily standup, IMO, should be only to remove impediments, and if you have none, then a sentence or two will suffice. I see the DS as the most useful meeting, as you are aware of what your workmates are doing. And if Scrum is still a pain in the back, then you have Kanban, which is sort of Scrum without the straitjackets.
  • blub 10y ago
    This kind of tweaking is frowned upon and you will be chastised for doing it. Yes you can do it (and probably should when you understand the purpose of each Scrummy practice), but don't expect to be praised by Scrummers.
    • nl 10y ago
      I've had people on my team frown at my tweaking. I'm extremely happy to discuss the reasons I want to change something, but all to often the only counter-argument is "that isn't Scrum". I'm 100% fine with that, but I'm not going to do something if the only reason for it is religion.
    • matthewmacleod 10y ago
      That's nonsense, in my experience. Most people doing Scrum-like development in my experience are much more interested in a development process that works well and produces good results than they are about over-attachment to process.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > The daily standup, IMO, should be only to remove impediments, and if you have none, then a sentence or two will suffice. 100% this. The only thing a synchronous team-wide meeting is useful for is revealing a significant issue and getting a prompt and definite acknowledgement from the team. And then, if it's a priority, some help with the issue. But given the proper tool, even that feature can be made asynchronous.
    • 10y ago
• greyman 10y ago
  For our dev team Scrum works fine, the key is to use it just as a framework, and not following every rule to the letter. For example: - Obsession with points We don't have that obsession, sometimes we even don't assign story points, just hour estimates - Meeting extravaganza - Again, for example remote people don't need to attend all meetings, sometimes we just clarify the work items outside the meetings. - The sprint has its own backlog, which can be changed only in agreement with the team and the product owner. We also don't have this... if I finished my tasks, I just move new item from backlog to sprint and work on it. - Refactoring, reading code, researching a topic in detail are all seen as "not working on actual story points, which is what you are paid to do". This has some truth to it... regarding research, we do this outside the Scrum.
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    Sounds like you are doing "scrum but" aka your own methodology. However their article is criticizing pure unadulterated scrum.
    • dalai 10y ago
      The article is also criticizing their particular version of scrum. For example "collecting points" or obsessing about them is not unadulterated scrum; the word points or planning poker are not even mentioned in the scrum guide. Any good developer, scrum master or book on scrum will tell you that story points are not a performance metric and they are only to be used by the PO and just for planning ahead. There is little to criticise about pure unadulterated Scrum because there is surprisingly little prescribed and what little there is they openly tell you that you can change it in the retrospective. The real problem is that management, agile coaches (and unfortunately sometimes also some developers) often want to religiously apply every little thing they ever read in a book and seemed like a good idea. I think that solutions to all the problems the author mentioned are possible without deviating significantly or at all from scrum -- should that be important for whatever reason. The only prerequisite is that everyone involved is open to change.
  • blub 10y ago
    Using time instead of points breaks the whole concept of sprint-based estimation which Scrum tries so very hard to defend. Basically Scrum claims that software developers can't estimate based on time so it forces them to use an abstract number instead. Over time this would lead to being able to estimate a project in sprint-sized blocks. This is why sprints have a fixed duration, the sprint backlog should not be changed, stories are awarded the full points or 0 during review, commitments to finish the sprint, etc.
• zelos 10y ago
  "Because the assumption is that refactoring will be a few hours' work, or even shorter if it's renaming a class here and replacing a file there. These are only the most superficial cases of refactoring, however..." That always bothers me, too. The changes you can make continuously are hardly worth bothering to worry about, because they're so small and quick and decent developers will do them automatically. It's the changes that take several days or a week that really make the difference in the long term.
  • afroisalreadyin 10y ago
    Exactly my point. The changes that are risky (difficult to do, might take more time than planned) are those that will make the greatest difference in all code quality aspects. And these are the ones that are pretty much impossible to integrate into Scrum.
• cageface 10y ago
  I've been doing Scrum-driven development for a few years now after working much more independently for most of my career. I understand why managers like it because it at least lends some structure and predictability to what is an inherently unpredictable enterprise. But the author's criticisms of the incentives of Scrum are on point I think. Because the stories are always articulated in terms of user facing features they encourage developers to hack things together in the most expedient way possible and completely fail to capture the need to address cross cutting concerns, serious consideration of architecture, and refactoring. This is how you can get two years into a project and have managers and clients that think that things are going well when the actual code is an increasingly unmaintainable rats' nest. Good devs confronted with this kind of mess will eventually burn out on sticking their necks out defending necessary but opaque refactoring tasks and move on to greener pastures.
  • maxxxxx 10y ago
    In my view the only way to handle this is to make constant refactoring part of the work without telling management. If you ask for permission for refactoring you will almost always get a "No".
    • humanrebar 10y ago
      This is mentioned in the article as possible only for small changes. When the refactoring involves more systemic problems, it becomes impossible to make the change in the course of making other client-facing changes. I'll add that some subsystems are a mess but stable. It's difficult to make refactorings with other changes when there aren't other changes to make. I see this in particular with old but stable subsystems that will need to be ported to new environments someday, but it's never a good day to lay the groundwork for that inevitable change.
      • lmm 10y ago
        > I see this in particular with old but stable subsystems that will need to be ported to new environments someday, but it's never a good day to lay the groundwork for that inevitable change. I think it's correct to defer that work until you need it. You may end up never porting that subsystem, in which case refactoring the currently-stable implementation is wasted effort. As and when porting becomes an actual business requirement it can be prioritized appropriately.
• nxzero 10y ago
  Maybe it's me, but the real issue with professional scrum masters is that it's rare to find any that practice agility as a way of life. Majority of professionals I've met appear to lack any ability to improvise and literally just follow the book on what to do without any critical analysis of how their situation fits with the defaults provided. Basically, my issue with scrum is its community.
  • VLM 10y ago
    Superficially the google term you're looking for is "cargo cult" But how to fix cargo cult depends on the root cause and there are many: 1) Authoritarianism, my boss said read this book, this book said XYZ, therefore XYZ is true. How could the book possibly be wrong? Or for book, insert rockstar ninja consultant or training class or whatever. 2) Religious belief, sure none of this makes logical sense but if you have blind faith and are not one of those apostates, it'll work just fine. Just relax and perform the ritual. 3) Deep game, where we actually run on anarchy or waterfall but someone needs XYZ on their resume so superficially we've skinned it as XYZ. Dig enough and you'll find what really runs the place is something else. 4) Blame games, a large part of management is how blame is distributed, not just distributing work, and when a subgroup who thinks they're agile-ing to distribute work comes in contact with a group using agile mostly to distribute blame or to stall for time or just to goof off on company time, its kinda like matter-antimatter.
• thefastlane 10y ago
  do we see bank analysts playing 'planning poker' when it comes to putting together pitch decks or research analyses? no. and they'd transfer out of any group where a manager tried to implement such a practice. if a software engineer is more than a couple years out of college, i don't think she/he should put up with it either.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > do we see bank analysts playing 'planning poker' when it comes to putting together pitch decks or research analyses? no. Most industries (don't know about bank analytics in particular) are more personality driven and/or more repeatable. There are few industries that: - make entirely new things on a regular basis - are mysterious to laypeople - cannot ship 50% of a solution and get 50% of the value
    • zelos 10y ago
      I don't think those are all that true of software in general. Most software isn't particularly new: how many "Yet Another CRUD app" projects are there? And with software you can ship a percentage of the features and add more later, unlike (say) hardware manufacturing, civil engineering, chemical engineering or architecture. Maybe software is reasonably different in that there are a lot of management level people with little technical knowledge of how the work gets done? I don't know how that compares to other similarly technical industries.
    • VLM 10y ago
      OK medical in general, obstetrician in specific. Or perhaps dentist. Certainly the whole pathology sector.
  • blub 10y ago
    These are just games designed to avoid some estimation biases. The problem with biases is that one still can be caught by them even if they're aware that they exist, so such games might have some value. An alternative would be to explain what the biases are and address them in each estimation round. But who does that really? We've settled on playing games, which can seem childish at times.
• stevesun21 10y ago
  After I read this complain-based article, my only question for this author is what's your fix/suggestion? Otherwise, I don't get what the point of this guy write this article.
  • blub 10y ago
    Deconstruct Scrum and perhaps something like RUP/DAD (Scrum doesn't tackle the whole lifecycle) into components and understand what the purpose of each component is. Start from Kanban and add stuff until you get a process that matches the critieria of the organisation. This requires a lot of skill though, so many teams are stuck with one-size-fits-all tools like Scrum, especially now that it's become a management buzzword. And it does a not too bad job at delivering somehing of passable quality not too late. :)
    • stevesun21 10y ago
      I have been two different org, one use scrum and one use kanban, working in the team apply kanban was feel like a sunny afternoon in a park - you lose the awareness of time, and just want to lay back and work on few things for long time, but suddenly your manager told you there is a timeline, no one knows until your CEO keep ask (yep, a startup).
      • blub 10y ago
        A Kanban board should be customized by the team to help them achieve their goals. e.g: if timelines are important, a due date should probably be added to the tasks/post-its. Assuming some tasks are more urgent than others, the todo column should be sorted, or tasks could be assigned priorieties. Adding a limit to the done column which triggers an event like a retrospective/celebration can help avoid the feeling of an endless grind.
    • dkersten 10y ago
      Instead of inventing my own system, I would go with the (rather new) GROWS Method[1], which is designed to be adapted to suit your needs (but only after a certain level of experience is gained). GROWS splits its components into stages, through which your team progresses as they become experienced with the various practices. The stages are: Stage 1 is very simple and easy and about getting your team setup on good practices (eg source control). At this stage, you should be following it rigidly. Stage 2 is about making sure the right people are working on the right things at the right time. A rigid but simple agile-development system. Stage 3 is about applying judgement and critical thinking to stage 2, adding release planning, retrospectives and other plan-and-feedback practices Stage 4 is the stage where your team is experienced enough to tune and alter the practices so that they work best for your unique situation Stage 5 is when you're ready to replicate your teams practices for other teams or environments. I like it because it acknowledges that no one-size-fits-all system can be perfect for everyone and provides a framework that allows itself to be changed, but does so around a "skills model" to prevent premature change. "This requires a lot of skill though" Exactly. Which, in my experience, most teams do not have. All too often have I been in a team practicing some form of agile, but they don't like X and would prefer Y and so they change the framework to suit their needs and then it fails and they blame the framework, saying it doesn't work, when in reality what happened is they changed and broke it, because they are not (yet!) experienced enough in that framework to actually tweak it to their needs. GROWS is designed with this in mind. [1] growsmethod.com
• hoodoof 10y ago
  Scrum is the worst possible development methodology, except for all the others.
  • tjl 10y ago
    There's a lot of development methodologies and if you actually think this you probably haven't seen many of the others. It regularly seems to me that people think that there's Agile/Scrum and there's Waterfall and that's it. The first year engineering design course (and the first year programming course) in my department cover a number of different approaches.
• dudifordMann 10y ago
  I agree that there are individuals and companies who have defined such ridged structure and expectation into their Scrum method that they can no longer be considered an agile approach missing two of the key purposes of agile approaches: * Individuals and interactions over processes and tools * Responding to change over following a plan Now, I cannot say that Scum abstractly is a bad approach to attempting to be more agile. Many of us have employed some form of it with varying degrees of success, but, the expectations on software developers from a business perspective are more rigid for business development and tracability purposes, which can,on occasion, omit the consideration of resource demands and complexities. Often, i believe, it is that a lack of understanding the purpose of the agile manifesto and the poor implementation of a method at the top level of the developer and managment ladder which is the underlying cause. In the post, the author cites 3 hour or more meeting where he feels there are too many people there. This would be an item for the retrospective feeding the next iteration, but he only says "Blergh" about the needed feedback. He states that the standup is more ritualistic, but the point is to ensure each member understands where the sprint stands, inspire collaboration, but really take ownership of the code. It could be that the team size is too big, or that the team really has not taken ownership of their code. When all is said and done, you have to buy into the Scrum process, the process has to be flexible, and the stakeholders have to not believe it is a magical development method that fixes all the issues of the software development process.
  • camtarn 10y ago
    "the team size is too big" - this is a very good point. Towards the upper limit of the recommended Scrum team size (3-9) they can get really unwieldy. I've been to a standup with an even larger team, which included a couple of design and marketing folks, and it was unbearable. The recommendation's there for a good reason.
  • Meegul 10y ago
    His complaint about the standups interrupting productive work rings a bell with me though. I see no reason why a daily status update over the general channel on slack doesn't serve the same purpose as a standup meeting. In fact, make it so there's a loose timeframe, say 30 minutes, and you wouldn't be interrupting people, nor forcing them to stare at a wall. My team hasn't tried anything like that, but I think it could really be useful. It encourages better communication throughout the day as well, as it gets people using Slack. Plus, it gives managers the ability to keep track of what people say each day.
• camtarn 10y ago
  Quoting a nice idea from the article: "One way to achieve this might be putting work items through what I would call an algebra of complexity, i.e. an analysis of the sources of complexity in a work item and how they combine to create delays. The team could then study the backlog to locate the compositions that cause the most work and stress, and solve these knots to improve the codebase. The backlog would then resemble a network of equations, instead of a list of items, where solving one equation would simplify the others by replacing unknowns with more precise values." I've never been on a team that does pure Scrum - even ones which intended to do so always ended up with what we termed "Scrum-ish": taking the ideas from the base methodology, but adding a whole level of 'house rules' aiming to patch up obvious gaps. For instance, always making time for one refactoring or technical debt task per sprint, tracking accuracy of estimated time versus actual time elapsed (deeply uncomfortable but very useful!), the hundreds of different rules around trying to make standups shorter and more useful. I am a big fan of well-run retrospectives, though: they can be a really nice way to feel empowered as a developer, especially when you have one retrospective identifying that Thing A keeps causing everyone pain, and the next retrospective having everyone say 'Hey, Thing A is so much better now!' Never realized they weren't 'meant' to be about technical matters, though: in our Scrum-ish teams, they were always open for all topics, and I think that's a very good idea. Of course, the fun thing about Scrum-ish teams is now you have a whole new level of debate that can happen: "We're failing because we're not doing Scrum rigorously enough!" vs "We're failing because we're doing Scrum too rigorously, and what we need is more house rules!" ;)
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > tracking accuracy of estimated time versus actual time elapsed (deeply uncomfortable but very useful!) It should only be uncomfortable if the team means 'commitments' when they say 'estimates'. This is part of the reason stories are generally pointed with (more or less) triangular numbers. So that teams stop fretting about missing estimates by an order of magnitude or less.
  • afroisalreadyin 10y ago
    The retrospective is also my favorite thing about Scrum (or my favorite Scrum ritual, let's say). As you said, when it works, the team feels the rush of having solved a significant problem together. This is the reason I think it should be done more often, and more thoroughly. (I'm the author of the post, btw)
• chatwinra 10y ago
  This talk about agile by one of the founders was posted on Hacker News a while back, it is good, and I think complements this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548334 To summarise, the issue Dave Thomas has with agile is that it has become a prescriptive framework, 'Agile' (with a capital 'A'), rather than what it originally started out to be, which is a means of being agile (small 'a'). I really liked this talk, and agree with both him and the OP of this thread that some parts of the 'Scrum' as a prescriptive framework may not work for you. I find it a bit strange that the OP singled out the retrospective as being a negative- for me this is the best part about 'Scrum', as long as you're not too prescriptive about it. Really the retrospective is a chance to improve yourselves as team each sprint, and it's a chance for people to get stuff off their chests. It shouldn't be just about scrum, it can be anything - adopting new approaches to development eg: TDD, discussing the state of the code, anything. That's what makes them (for me anyway and I think(!) my teams) enjoyable & useful meetings.
  • blub 10y ago
    An effective retrospective requires creating a safe environment for sharing ideas and a SM which can foster such an environment. I am guessing that such an environment is quite rare, hence the percieved lack of utility of the retrospective. I can speak from experience that this is very hard to do. I expect that I will have to deal with a brewing technical conflict in the team soon and I'm not sure what's the best way to do it. I've also seen what happens if such coflicts are sweeped under the carpet and it's not nice.
• depr 10y ago
  >The daily standup deserves a blog post of its own I found this to be a really good article about standups: http://www.yegor256.com/2015/01/08/morning-standup-meetings.html http://www.yegor256.com/2015/01/08/morning-standup-meetings....
• hidro 10y ago
  I like how Scrum promotes transparency and trains each individual to become self-managed (or at least getting better at it). But it often feels like it's being hyped up, with many people getting obsessed over its practices/rituals. Estimating work is a nice idea, but using 'story points' for it just feels like a bad API decision - I have never seen a new Scrum team member (including me) getting it at 1st try. And maybe it's just me, but having a full time, dedicated Scrum Master, who serves solely as a facilitator (without having any actual role in product delivery) is a nightmare, especially for teams that are used to Scrum practices.
  • UK-AL 10y ago
    "I have never seen a new Scrum team member (including me) getting it at 1st try." - I've never seen one get an accurate time based estimate either. Even experienced ones.
    • matthewmacleod 10y ago
      That's one of the reasons that Scrum doesn't use time-based estimates.
  • blub 10y ago
    I am a SM and a dev and it's not at all a comfortable position to be in, because it's often making demands on my time and there are conflicts of interest (but not as bad as SM/PO or SM/manager). The SM is major piece of the Scrum puzzle and a lot of practices lose their value if the SM is not paying attention. This over-reliance on the SM is a minus for Scrum IMO.
• jschulenklopper 10y ago
  > The use of story points appears to be one of the defining features of Scrum. Practice and experience may have led to this conclusion, but it will be good to know that the (original, Scrum-defining) Scrum Guide, http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html, doesn't even mention nor defines "story points". Obviously, there is planning and estimation involved in Scrum, and story points can be a metric used for "amount of work"... but it's not a defining feature.
• mattei 10y ago
  This is so spot on. Use the parts that work, modify to suit the teams needs. I've seen this done to a massively productive and happy team.
• nutheracc 10y ago
  NoEstimates: http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/the-noestimates-movement/ http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/the-noestimates-moveme...
  • matthewmacleod 10y ago
    That's a great idea if you don't have any customers or constraints. In the real world, there are externalities that have an impact and require some estimation. Maybe we have to provide new support materials to customers, or finish a contract with a third-party data provider, or change our infrastructure. It's exceptionally hard to do some of these things without being able to make commitments of some kind. Estimates allow us to create a guideline, and subsequently alter either the thing we are going to deliver (i.e. dropping lower-priority features) or the time we are going to deliver (i.e. missing the deadline). If I hired a builder, and he told me that he refused to estimate the amount of money or time it would take to construct my property, you can be sure I'd move on. I have no idea why we'd consider it appropriate for an engineer to do this.
    • GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
      >If I hired a builder, and he told me that he refused to estimate the amount of money or time it would take to construct my property, you can be sure I'd move on. I have no idea why we'd consider it appropriate for an engineer to do this. When every builder (i.e. engineering team) anyone ever hired everywhere blew through their estimate ~70% of the time, perhaps it's time to reconsider that stance. See the Standish Group's annual CHAOS Report for an example of software project success statistics, e.g.: https://www.infoq.com/articles/standish-chaos-2015 https://www.infoq.com/articles/standish-chaos-2015 Estimates are just mutually agreed upon lies that engineering teams tell themselves.
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      If you could count the joists and studs and shingles needed for a computer project, sure you could make good estimates. But more often there's no architect drawing at all. Just some desired behaviors. "How long to build a house that will bring joy and success to the family that lives there?" You can understand when the builder hesitates to name a price, given a spec like that.
• tecmobowlbo 10y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the first complaint; no where in the official guide is the word "points" or "story points" mentioned. I've worked on at least 2 Scrum teams that didn't use story points. All the stories were broken down until they were all of approximately the same effort and then we planned sprints based on number of PBIs.
  • loopbit 10y ago
    I've almost always used story points and actually find them useful. As for the author's complaint, for me the key is this: > First of all, what are story points? Are they measures of time it takes to complete a story? If yes, then why are they not in terms of time? I don't think I've ever read the official scrum guide, but ever since I started using scrum (around 2004) the concept of story points was clear: They were "perfect days", i.e. days where you don't have any distractions and nothing goes wrong and everything works first try. As a fairly experienced developer, I can easily estimate how many of those perfect days will take me to do a task (at least if it's a technology I know). When estimating, the whole team estimates all tasks until there's a consensus (and you are right, ideally, all the stories should require similar effort). After that, the "perfect day" thing is forgotten, the estimates have no unit and the velocity starts playing it's role. And here's exactly why I like points: The link between real days and points is lost, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you completed X points in a specific sprint. Chances are that you'll complete X points in the next sprint. Iterate through a few sprints and you'll have a pretty good idea of what will be finished when.
• davidgerard 10y ago
  Scrum/Agile-English Dictionary http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/594955.html http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/594955.html But with our new Silver-Bullet Development Methodology™, it's a completely new world where none of your decades of experience apply! This changes the nature of development forever! p.s.: we sell certifications! (repeat for a new Silver Bullet roughly each decade)
• timwaagh 10y ago
  managers like it. control. results. evaluation. they get to treat programmers like laborers. programmers don't really have anything to gain with it. what surprises me, is that sometimes programmers ask for it. it illustrates how strong the desire is to follow the latest trend.
  • dasmoth 10y ago
    >>> what surprises me, is that sometimes programmers ask for it. it illustrates how strong the desire is to follow the latest trend. While I'm far from a Scrum fan, it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. For instance, it's probably better than "just do what the project manager says", especially if he tends towards micromanagement. And double-especially for people who thrive in group discussions but have trouble managing 1:1s. I suspect the trades also look different depending on level of experience. Scrum, at least in some incarnations, tends to be quite egalitarian, so I can see it appealing to more junior devs in environments where they feel the seniors get to do all the interesting stuff.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • xemdetia 10y ago
    If you have a management team that is very weak when it comes to planning agile does help a lot allowing the world of actual work estimates to enter the equation, or in the sprint structure you can broach the question 'what gets bumped to do this?' If a management team has an endless leash they just stack a thousand different arbitrary pieces in a pile, call it a release and set a deadline. Using agile enforces a workflow for short term planning where one didn't exist.
• ricardobeat 10y ago
  As usual, criticism is strongly shaped by experience. My experience is also limited to three or four workplaces, but I have never, ever, seen this "race for points" and definitely not being "awarded" the points at review time. The points don't mean anything by themselves, it's an abstract measure of effort whose value fluctuates wildly, influenced by team dynamics, individual productivity, type of work being done etc etc. Failing to understand that is starting with the wrong foot.
• scotty79 10y ago
  I think people don't understand the reason and given flexibility tend to choose completely counterproductive things to do. For example the only purpose for points and velocity is to give product owner idea of how much time will have to pass before a thing might even have a chance of being done. It tells him that you, for sure won't get this thing and that thing in next 2 weeks. The only utility of points for the developers is when doing planning poker. If something gets a lot of points then this means people are not sure how to do it and the thing needs to be discussed and broken down. After that, points have no use for the team and team shouldn't even be aware of its velocity and how much they burned so far this sprint. Those are the tools just for the product owner and scrum master. If product owner is satisfied with "it's going to be ready when it's going to be ready" then points after planning poker can be forgotten and you don't even need to calculate velocity. It's still worth to do the planning poker for the sake of the team discussion and so the product owner can deprioritize task that are hard but not crucial. But turning points and velocity and performance measure is dumbest thing you can get, because then it get's screwed and loses all utility. Same thing in estimations. If manager is going to negotiate estimates then you can as well not do it at all because they no longer carry any real information and are becoming just the reflection of managers hope slightly skewed towards developers hope (which was already overly optimistic).
  • Sammi 10y ago
    And velocity is not comparable between teams, because different teams will normalize their complexity points differently. The amount of complexity points that any type of task is given, is supposed to be emergent in that team, because this makes a team's optimism/pessimism bias moot. The reason to use complexily points and not time estimates is also exactly this - to remove preconceived anchoring.
  • davidwf 10y ago
    I wish I could highlight this a million times over. The idea of story points (which I have mixed feelings about regardless, but are not as bad as the author of the article mentions) is to produce a useful measure, which becomes instantly useless once it becomes a target. Once you start saying that you have to meet a certain velocity, you've gone off the rails.
• cheriot 10y ago
  No methodology can save us from managers that don't understand what they're managing. For various reasons this is more common in software development than other fields.
• cheriot 10y ago
  Keep in mind that Scrum was designed by consultants working for organizations that don't understand software development. So they designed a process that can make sense to people outside our industry. In order for it to go well, though, the person running the Scrum process needs to know how shit really works. This is rarely the case.
  • vpeters25 10y ago
    > Keep in mind that Scrum was designed by consultants working for organizations that don't understand software development. Scrum was "designed" by Ken Schwaber, a software project manager at the time looking for a better way to control software development processes. Schwaber discovered he could use an empirical process, rather than a defined one, to control software projects. He created Scrum following this principles.
    • cheriot 10y ago
      Good point, thanks. I was thinking of XP coming out of Chrysler. I'll stand by the last two sentences of that comment, though.
      • vpeters25 10y ago
        > the person running the Scrum process needs to know how shit really works. This is rarely the case. I agree, while a very simple process, people who don't get it tend to complicate it. They focus on the process instead of the result. Most failed scrum teams I've seen out there skip the retrospective meeting, which is in my opinion, the key of the whole thing: that's the meeting where team members usually realize they "own" the process and can steer it any way they desire.
• carlsborg 10y ago
  It's a dev methodology not a religion :/
  • kps 10y ago
    Right; religion only makes you go to confession once a week.
• jackcosgrove 10y ago
  In my experience, people matter more than methodologies. If you have good people on your team, product and dev, then you can make any methodology work. If you have bad people, no methodology will work. Advocating for one methodology or the other is far less important than hiring the right people. That said I prefer Agile to Waterfall by a lot, and Agile developed in reaction to Waterfall so I think it was a success.
  • tjl 10y ago
    It may be that Agile developed in reaction to Waterfall, but that just says to me that the creators didn't look at all the other methodologies out there.
• joe8756438 10y ago
  I disagree with most of the major criticisms here. I think it is a valid description of an experience using scrum half-heartedly, but not an argument against its purpose or value. Points, for example, the argument is based on the premise that teams are obsessed with points. What if the teams use points as a framework to discuss complexity? I have worked in scrum groups where if something was given a large point value it would be questioned and "split" to break the job into component tasks that could be done by separate people simultaneously (or some now some later). Long meeting times with the wrong people in the meeting? That's a managerial issue and has nothing to do with scrum. Writing stories is the main art of scrum and without good stories it is pointless. A story can be written to encourage a developers to improve quality of a codebase, share knowledge with another team, or take time to learn themselves. A really good story would encourage these things and also deliver customer value. Any system for managing software development hinges on good communication. SCRUM's main advantage to me is that it provides continuous opportunities for face to face communication. If you fail to take advantage or engage with those opportunities then it won't work, but I bet another "framework" wouldn't either.
  • tootie 10y ago
    This is my experience also. Points are complexity and high complexity tasks are most definitely to be addressed by breaking down stories. Dependencies are also easily addressed by setting a Definition of Ready. Don't accept a story if the dependencies aren't met (be that APIs, environments, designs, whatever). Simple. Planning/grooming we do in one hour. You good story writers is all. I once had a planning last 12 hours because the product management was so awful. If your team sucks, no process will save you.
    • joe8756438 10y ago
      Exactly. A good agile, and by extension SCRUM, process allows the developers to influence how things get done. If the way stories are written are leading the team to write unmaintainable code, change the way the stories are written. Or talk about why the problem exists in the first place and take action to fix it. Again, it all comes down to communication. If nobody wants to talk to each other, SCRUM is not going to help. As with all of these posts, they're extremely lacking in alternatives. Of course SCRUM won't work for every team, or even every project for the same team. But it provides a way for the team to evaluate and adjust how to best accomplish their goals in a straightforward and (if done right) low friction way. I think it's taken for granted how much effort is alleviated by adopting SCRUM. Just think how difficult it would be to develop an alternative process for every team, every project, every new person to join one of those teams or projects. Everyone has their own way of doing things, standardizing on a few universal goals aint a bad thing.
• neo2006 10y ago
  Both devs and managers are attracted to scrum for two different reasons: - devs like scrum because of the agility of it and the though that they will have more control on how to evolve the product and the code base and have the freedom to architect and develop the way they see it right. - managers like it because it gives them an oversight on how the team is performing and a possibility to have a more accurate estimate the a rule of a thumb. In my opinion scrum stop working when devs think that it's complete freedom and control over the product and/or managers think it is a magical spell to increase team productivity. Another reason that make scrum goes wrong is that religious believe that every rule in scrum manifesto needs to be applied as is so magic can happen, scrum is not a recipe but a guide that need to be adapted to each team, organization and context. Trying to follow the rules religiously will always fail.
• clifanatic 10y ago
  I got my first programming job, while still in college (as part of a co-op/internship program) in 1992, for the U.S. department of defense. As you can imagine, everything was BDUF there. It was very frustrating and the most annoying part was the massive disconnect between what the users expected, which was that they could suggest a change and see it on their desktop an hour later, and the reality of change and release management, regression testing, unexpected side effects, code entropy, etc. etc. Some time around 1999, I started to hear about "extreme programming" (XP), and when I looked into it, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, because here were people whose opinions people seemed to be paying attention to making the same observations that I was, but far more eloquently than I ever could, in a way that seemed to be resonating with users and project managers. I guess I'm too much of a "glass is half full" type, though, because it didn't take too long before XP gave way to "agile methodologies" which became "scrum" which is really BDUF with micromanaging daily standups.
• je_bailey 10y ago
  The aha moment for my team which changed us from a mindset of dealing with scrum to enjoying it was when we moved from aiming towards a number of story points to complete towards committing to the stories that we could individually complete in a sprint, without a concern for the associated story points. All of a sudden story points disassociated with time. They just became a number. a combination of complexity and understanding. A lesser, but still important shift, came with our changes to backlog grooming. When part of that grooming included poker planning to estimate points. This Spread that chore out, and our Sprint planning is now approximately half an hour as the team goes down the prioritized list and commits to stories.
  • Udik 10y ago
    Is each developer just working on as many stories as he can in a sprint, picking from a prioritized list? Because otherwise, how do you estimate what you can complete in a sprint? Don't you commit beforehand to deliver a certain amount of stories? And doesn't that translate to a certain number of story points?
    • je_bailey 10y ago
      We get the prioritized list, we review our other commitments in the upcoming Sprint, and starting from the top of the list we go down and developers pick which ones that they will work on. Since we've groomed these stories, we have an idea of complexity and one or more developer may have already taken the time to identify exactly what needs to be done. We don't commit before hand to deliver a specific number of stories, or a specific number of story points. That would never work. Rather we focus on what individuals believe they can achieve. Our velocity has become pretty consistent and our delivery of story points is close to 100%
• 0xmohit 10y ago
  It's worth mentioning a somewhat dated post "Thoughts on Scrum" [0] by Jethro Villegas [1] who works on Mozilla Firefox and earlier managed engineering for Flash Player. [0] http://junglecode.net/thoughts-on-scrum/ http://junglecode.net/thoughts-on-scrum/ [1] http://junglecode.net/about/ http://junglecode.net/about/
• alistairSH 10y ago
  One of the first things I was taught when I did my first Scrum Master course was that scrum is just guidelines. Teams are self-organizing and need to do what works for them. Most of the criticisms in this piece can be resolved by team members adapting processes so they work for the team. I've also encountered most of those problems in non-agile, non-scrum teams as well. Instead of obsessing over points, it's hours. Meeting hell can happen anywhere. Good employees will tell their managers when meetings become an impediment. Good managers work to fix it (and pro-actively try to prevent it). I always find it odd when somebody complains that sprint goals need team buy-in to change. Why is that a bad thing? Adjust and move on. Sometimes things don't go as planned, sometimes they go well. Hopefully, it all averages out at the end. Anyways, I guess I view scrum (or any other methodology) as a loose set of guidelines, not strict rules that must be enforced at all costs. If management is forcing the rules, even when they are becoming impediments, that's a sign of a management problem that is unlikely to be cured by a change in methodology.
  • softawre 10y ago
    Exactly true. I hate to say "that's why all of these articles are dumb", but really - is adapting something to your people that hard or unexpected?
• ebbv 10y ago
  I find points far more useful than time based estimates. The trick is to use points like categories and not try to treat them as 1 point = N of something. During my training the analogy was to categories of dogs based on size. So like a Chihuahua is maybe a 1 and a Great Dane is maybe an 8 (and there's 7 categories of dog size between them.) But a Malamute might also be an 8. Even though it's shorter than a Great Dane, it weighs maybe the same because it is more thickly muscled. But neither of those dogs is equal to 8 Chihuahuas. The point being that if you categorize stories like this, treating point values as categories rather than as 1 point = N of X, then that makes pointing a lot easier and a lot faster as your team builds up a methodology (what categories your team uses and what they mean is up to you, it doesn't matter as long as you are consistent.) This leads to meetings taking less time, and leads to a more consistent velocity than if you do something like 1 point = 2 hours or 1 point = something else rigid. If SCRUM doesn't work for your team by all means you should abandon it. But, to me, it sounds like his team is using it badly. It sounds like they are being really rigid, and it sounds like a few adjustments could lead to a lot more happiness. But maybe not.
• justsaysmthng 10y ago
  The author mentions this, but I'd like to insist on it a bit more: Scrum is a system of managing people, not a software development methodology. It's about transforming programmers into cogs and gently forcing them to obey certain rituals every day, until they slowly give up their individual creativity and initiative and become good 'team players' . And when someone says 'team player', I hear 'you belong to us now'. I disliked scrum since the moment it was decreed upon our team. And that's because pretty soon our team became obsessed with points and respecting the religion rather than doing the actual work. The final drop came when I refactored some code, made it twice as fast using half as much memory (the proverbial 'much better'), only to have to fight the team to accept the changes, because that wasn't in the backlog. Methodology is only good when it helps you achieve your goals easier and faster, safer, etc. But when the methodology becomes the goal, then your job changes into satisfying the methodology, rather then being the best at what you like and enjoy. And this is the exact status quo that larger organisations love - people focused on small irrelevant tasks, while the 'grand scheme' is determined by management. Not for me. I use certain parts of it in my work today (develop in sprints, demo at the end of sprint, planning, backlog and current tasks), but if I see "we use scrum" in the job description, then I'm not your man.
• vpeters25 10y ago
  > First of all, what are story points? Are they measures of time it takes to complete a story? If yes, then why are they not in terms of time? Are they measures of complexity? Story points are a measure of "relative amounts of effort". A 2 point story is twice as hard, as far as effort to implement it than a 1 point one. > Scrum meetings (aka rituals) have been among the most miserable hours of my life... Would you rather have many meetings almost every day, or a single big ol' meeting every few weeks so you can focus on coding without interruptions? > The review meeting causes utterly unnecessary anxiety (Oh my god, will my feature work?) It should not cause anxiety because it MUST work. The review meeting is to show stakeholders a "potentially shippable product increment". Everything you show on the review meeting should have been extensively tested already. > Why estimate stories that you are going to break down anyway? You only break down stories if they are too big. You are not supposed to work every detail on a planning meeting. > but in Scrum, the retro is explicitly supposed to be about the Scrum process itself, not about the codebase The retro is not about the scrum process but about how it is working for the team. All these issues you have already complained about should be reserved for this meeting where the whole team can decide which adjustments to make. > The main goal of Scrum is to minimize risk and make sure the developers do not deviate from the plan. I will come back to "Scrum controlmania" later. It is regretful that, like all the other "why scrum sucks" posts I've seen on HN, it all boils down to a bad scrummaster not managing expectations and taking the time to explain where the process really comes from.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    For some engineering tasks, the work and the planning are almost the same thing. Once you've explored the problem, the code is the small part. When asked to estimate, the answer is "I'll let you know when I'm getting into it". Then you're made to do a 'spike', which is indistinguishable from doing the task. Except do it in a day now. So the Engineer thrashes around trying to figure it all out in a day, and comes up with some number. The planning phase is now over, so they're supposed to just execute, regardless of what (bogus) number they found. So they start. At the end of the sprint, they've done less than if they'd just started the task the first day. They get 'measured' as a low performer. Of course its the process that's performing badly, not the Engineer. They get frustrated, resentful and stop cooperating with the scrum master. I've seen this so many times at so many places its just exhausting. No amount of discussion can convince the evangelical Scrum experts that something is wrong with the process.
• bgruber 10y ago
  Re: daily standups. A lot of what the OP criticizes standups for is what I like about them. The content is only half of it. In my experience, it can be very easy for a team to cease feeling like one and instead become a loosely-coupled collection of independent contractors. 15-20 minutes a day of forced synchronous communication goes a long way to making you feel like you're actually on a team and therefore act like it, and is well worth the minimal time. This is especially true if the team isn't all in the same physical space. It can be disruptive, so scheduling it at the right time is important. Of course, if you already have meeting overload, standup is going to feel like the worst.
  • therealdrag0 10y ago
    I also like it when after the standup updates, most of us stick around and shoot the shit for 10 minutes. Good way to build camaraderie.
• landmark3 10y ago
  mandatory link to alternative: http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/
• lkrubner 10y ago
  I think the argument for scrum is something like "Our big organization has complicated politics and scrum is one way of dealing with those politics." However, I often wish the management would directly address the internal politics that undermine productivity. I realize that it is awkward and uncomfortable for managers to talk honestly about the differences they have with other managers and other teams, but that is also their profession. That is, working through any relationship that undermines productivity is the job of a manager. I wrote about this here: "The Agile process of software development is often perverted by sick politics" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-agile-process-of-software-development-is-often-perverted-by-sick-politics http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-agile-process-of-so...
• davidrupp 10y ago
  Everything I Need To Know About Agile I Learned From Reading "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series)", by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres. Oh, and from working side-by-side with the best practitioners in the business at ThoughtWorks for three years. But the book is sufficient.
• neilni 10y ago
  One of the most essential part about Scrum is that it aligns the understanding across all the stakeholders, including business owner, customer, designer, developer etc. Hence the meeting, prioritization, backlog, daily standup/daily write up as development process artifact etc to focus on the priorities that create the most business value under flexible scope, fixed time and fixed money. scope, time and money are the three variables of a development process. At the end I think the author is proposing with the process for a flexible scope, flexible time and flexible money, which often is a internal project that doesn't have direct business applicable value. In this case, the author should really just break into another side team without business owner and, or even without project owner and simply use Kanban as the solution, instead of sticking around with Scrum. I believe every process has its shortcomings, but instead of pointing the wrongs, I'd appreciate more if the author describe what the situation/stage/type of this project, and why scrum doesn't work in this case, and how a different approach can optimize the outcomes.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Except most of the 'stakeholders' don't give a fig for what the Engineers value. Like technical debt, robustness of the solutions, relieving bottlenecks both in code and in development. So Engineers get herded into little incremental projects that management can swallow as having 'business value'. And the herd marches toward the cliff as the code base wanders around the solution space but never gets fundamentally sound. Anyway, that's my jaded (from experience) view.
    • tootie 10y ago
      No process will solve the lack of understanding. Also, this goes both ways since engineers frequently don't give a fig about business priorities. Sometimes your refactor isn't really that valuable and is costing the company money. If you have a culture of trust between departments, you should be able to have honest conversations.
      • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        That's exactly the call that gets made again and again, by managers. They rarely value code quality; so easy to dismiss with "that's just a refactor". Converse all you want. Business folk are not going to believe that Engineering isn't foolish and just "costing the company money".
• wtbob 10y ago
  > What I have a hard time understanding is why the ancient, simple communication form of text is given second seat. The truth of the matter is that, especially under the constraint of distributed teams, it's difficult to beat text. That's a really good point. I'd be excited to see what a team could do if each developer wrote a one-page memo about what he did and what he was going to do once an iteration, and a few sentences for each day. Throw 'em in a log, and they might even aid the retrospective.
  • douche 10y ago
    What a fantastic history of a project that would be... Maybe we could just go back to .plan files, like Carmack.
  • ljf 10y ago
    Not to take away from either point, and I largely agree, but written word is our 'mode 2' - a lot can be missed without talking face to face. Yes the issue with standups/scrum cereomonies is if people ignore all the 'other' info they are receiving and for what ever reason choose to ignore it. The real key for Scrum for me has to be not only teams that want to write good code, but teams that WANT to get better at working together. That takes the whole team. If the team aren't bought in to this, then I'm not sure which project management tool will work for them, but it sure isn't scrum!
• _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  State of our industry, being "fan" of something or "not a big fan" of something. You should not be a fan of a tool, but use the right tool for the job. If Scrum is the right tool, use Scrum. If Kanban is the right tool, use Kanban. If Six Sigma is the right tool, use Six Sigma. If waterfall is the right tool, use waterfall. Second, if you can't use a tool, don't use it (I've seen companies using Scrum with excellent requirements engineering, rearchitecture/refactoring, headroom, ...)
• dimino 10y ago
  Scrum definitely sucks, but it sucks less than most of the other options. Kind of like democracy. If you don't like meetings, planning, or giving estimates, you probably don't like working on software for a living, because I simply don't know how to build software without meeting with other people, coming up with an idea, and telling the people giving me money when I hope to be done.
• lazerwalker 10y ago
  So I've never done Scrum-with-a-capital-S, but I've worked in environments that practice by-the-book Extreme Programming, as well as other flavors of Agile. I agree with a lot of what the author is saying. They're describing a process that appears to be relatively broken, and identifying some good reasons why they're broken. What's missing is flexibility. As per e.g. the Agile Manifesto (http://www.agilemanifesto.org http://www.agilemanifesto.org), the entire point of frameworks like Scrum is to provide a loose set of processes that you adjust and tweak to your specific team. If you're blindly following the process, and slavishly adhering to things like how precisely your daily standup MUST work, you're following the letter but not the spirit. You're being "Agile" with a capital A, but your team isn't actually being "agile" (the adjective), which is actually the important bit. The correct response to "our team is unhealthily obsessed with story points, and yet doesn't get value out of them" (or standups, or retros, or whatever) isn't to say "story points are broken". It's to say "this bit of process isn't helping us right now. What can we do to modify the process to provide more value to our team?"
• grandalf 10y ago
  I think Scrum is successful in organizations where there is a lot of finger pointing and cynicism, and the engineering team is happy to measure progress in "sprints" in order to deal with upstream requests that they fundamentally don't respect, and possibly a product vision vacuum in which decision are routinely made and reversed, making careful and judicious architecture impossible. In such an environment, developers prefer to drastically over test their code, and to undertake work in manageable sprints that let management claim success and understanding even when neither exist. If you already have a very strong product market fit, and you need to hire developers whose judgement you don't trust, or if there are extrinsic sources of timeline pressure (like investors or non-technical management who think developers are lazy... essentially anyone other than users or customers), then Scrum is perfect for your organization. The other constituency that seems to love Scrum is product managers who either have no vision for the product or no control of the vision, and are essentially being asked to be cat herders and manage engineers without earning their respect or having any authority over them.
• frandroid 10y ago
  We now use Kanban on our team, after using Scrum for a couple years. Pointing is a process to discover unexpected hurdles or uncover hidden knowledge from coworkers, and as a guideline. By not having sprints, you just focus on your current ticket, and not artificial deadlines or points. Tickets will be done when they are done, and managers don't have expectations of completeness that as disconnected from reality. We've added priority swim lanes to our process. We have a prioritization meeting with PMs every week to assign priority to tickets, order items in the high and medium priority lanes, and review blocked items to see if anything can be nudged back to a working column. The process is clear, the expectations are fluid, the work gets done in the time it needs to get done.
  • eli 10y ago
    I'm considering a similar approach with my team. Any specific resources or books or tips you found especially helpful?
    • jesalg 10y ago
      We use a similar approach in my company and the key here is to borrow the parts that work for your organization from Scrum and blend them with a much simpler Kanban approach. Don't follow a methodology blindly just because someone wrote a book about it. Keep evaluating & tweaking the process until you think it's at a point where it's working well for your organization.
  • lmm 10y ago
    There's certainly a lot to like about that approach. But my experience is that it makes it very easy to end up with tickets that end up taking months (because there's no longer a natural point at which to stop and take stock), and/or accepting tickets that don't really have clearly defined acceptance criteria, which risks working on something that won't actually turn out to be useful. I don't like the artificial 2-week cadence of Scrum but I think I might still prefer it to not having one at all.
    • a-priori 10y ago
• Fifer82 10y ago
  I want to make bad, difficult to maintain code, I want to spend more money doing it, and want to extract all of the enjoyment out of programming for those on the project so that innovation is stifled. Would Scrum be a good choice?
• mhale 10y ago
  The most important agile practice, imho, is far and away the Retrospective. A good retrospective process will fix all other problems. In the post, you sort of dismiss it out of hand because it is supposed to be a discussion limited to scrum, but that is an arbitrary and self-imposed restriction. You are doing it wrong. Remove that restriction and the doors will open up. The retrospective is about creating time for the team to review what works and what doesn't about the software development process in general (no need to limit to scrum). I've seen retrospective discussions veer into company culture, the need for faster hardware, testing processes, etc. Anything related to making the software, the software development process, or the team better should be on the table. A good retrospective enables the team to use its sprints as experiments to try different things, to evolve the practices to better fit the needs of the team and organization. If stand-ups aren't working, go a sprint without them, or doing them differently -- whatever change would address the weakness identified by the team -- then in the next retrospective reflect on whether it actually improved things. Rinse and repeat. Done properly, a good retrospective will enable your team to evolve and get better and better with every sprint. Points can be frustratingly fuzzy, but they serve a valuable purpose. They give a measure of team productivity (e.g. velocity), even if imperfect. Yes points can be gamed, but a team should learn quickly that gaming only serves to fool themselves. Because of they can be gamed, I'm not a fan of using points as an externally visible "vanity metric". They should only be used or shared within the team. They should not show up in performance reviews or presentations to management. But points can be very useful as an internal metric for the team to measure whether or not tweaks to the process made a positive impact. You need some way to objectively measure the success or failure of your process experiments. Of course, any metrics used are themselves certainly deserving of scrutiny and fine-tuning, as poor metrics lead to poor decisions. To me the benefit of points (or t-shirt size estimates) over something like hours is that in software development, hour-precision estimates give a false sense of accuracy. It requires more effort to provide more precise estimates, yet they won't be any more accurate (given the inherent non-repetitive nature of software development). Thus, the use of a coarse-grained measure like points serves to re-enforce the notion that the estimate are inherently imprecise and that we don't want to waste effort on greater precision estimates. All that said, whether or not to use points or any measure of team productivity at all is a team decision. If the measure isn't serving the goal of improving the software and the software dev process, then change it or get rid of it. That's the beauty of the retrospective -- it explicitly encourages this sort of process-hacking and fine-tuning. Embrace the Retrospective!
• purpleidea 10y ago
  Just read the summary which I highly agree with and will quote here: > So, in summary, Scrum * wastes too much of the developers' time for management * does not lead to good quality code * is a control freak which does not leave room for new ideas and innovation.
• andyidsinga 10y ago
  >> The daily standup deserves a blog post of its own. This religious ritual has become a staple of every team in the world. Ten minutes of staring into the void, talking about what you did while no one else listens, because they were in the middle of something five minutes ago and will go back to it in another five minutes, and waiting for everyone else to finish. I've had this happen my times while I was leading the project - it bugs me. I've ended up reducing daily standups and replacing with walking around (physically and virtually) and chatting with people and getting similar results. Of course, "similar results" here is that I heard what someone had to say but nobody else did - so a key to this walking around approach is to tell each person what other people are doing in order to connect the dots. On the surface this might seem terribly inefficient, but there are a lot of positives, biggest of which is building good relationships with team members and learning about all the other little things going on in life. On the down side, for people who are only part time on my team (not uncommon in my bigco setting) there is extra scheduling effort and discipline required to make these chats happen frequently.
• daly 10y ago
  John Cleese (Monty Python) in "Meetings, Bloody Meetings" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYnVt-umSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYnVt-umSA You need to rent this video and show it to the team. (and rent "More Bloody Meetings"). Scrum is a management technique, not related to programming. In fact, it is a "micro-management" technique. However, those who lead don't seem to know how to conduct meetings. I don't see scrum training that even hints at the fundamentals of management, even the fundamentals of meetings.
• mrharrison 10y ago
  I guess there are many way to use points, but what was described in this article isn't the way we use them. Points are great for a group of people to groom a story (estimate a features difficulty). Points are an estimate of difficulty. The way we do it is we have a story that describes what feature will be built, then as a group we talk about it and then all at the same time (so we aren't persuaded by others) rate the story with points (level of difficulty) and if we all (developers) rate it at the same points then we add the points, if we have different opinions on the points (level of difficulty) then we discuss why we think it's easier or harder. And this helps others who wrote the story foresee issues or know of other simpler solutions. Works great if you ask me, and that's how we were taught to do it.
• retbull 10y ago
  I've been noticing more and more that I code around the stories rather than following the best practices from the beginning. When I am adding a DB connection and we don't have liquibase or fliway in place I can't add it because that is a ticket for next week and I need to get it done now. I write code that sucks so that I don't break from my sprint and possibly work on something else first.
  • douche 10y ago
    I struggle to believe that people follow a management practice that is broken enough that it encourages doing things the wrong way and slavishly adhering to a procedure. Wait, never mind... I just saw my Dilbert day calendar...
• koistya 10y ago
  "As any developer will tell you, software development is a marathon, not a series of sprints." I would argue with that.
• vannevar 10y ago
  There are some valid criticisms here, though on balance I think the author enumerates costs without considering benefits. But the biggest complaint is a result of a common misconception: that scrum is somehow a replacement for software design. It is not, nor is it intended to be. The author seems to have a glimmer of understanding that this is the case: Scrum, however, is much closer to the problem solving approach, where analysis (breaking down a problem, and reassembling the solution) is the organizational tool. In order for an interpretive community to emerge, an organization needs ambiguity, open-ended conversations, and alternative perceptions. All of this, Scrum leaves to something else, whatever it is. But then goes on as though Scrum precludes any kind of thoughtful design or experimental innovation. Nonsense. Nothing in Scrum suggests that a team mindlessly go through sprint after sprint without ever pausing to have design sessions or build prototypes. And there is scant mention of the product owner at all; it's as though the author believes that software is designed by developers, for developers. Scrum is a way to implement a software design, flexibly and with the understanding that the design will change along the way. How you decide what to implement, how you arrive at that initial design, is up to you. If your organization doesn't understand how to create and manage the abstractions that make up a software application to begin with, then Scrum isn't going to save you.
• mmattax 10y ago
  I managed a small team of engineers and synchronous daily standups just broke down with remote teams and timezones. It also just felt unproductive - it became something we did to feel like we had "best practices" when in reality it was a waste of everyone's time. I got the sense that everyone would essentially forget what they said/heard at the end of the meeting (or was simply tuned out). I ended up launching a tool to solve this problem: (https://jell.com https://jell.com). We're a lot happier showing a "todo list" with each other and still have a place to write out the challenges/progress we're making - all while respecting each others time.
  • douche 10y ago
    You don't need to be remote or across timezones for this to happen. I can't help but feel that standups are a huge waste of time. If it is a thing that really needs to be done, why not do it asynchronously in a slack channel when you show up, rather than interrupting everybody and wasting a collective work-day across the team every day in lost flow time, by doing it synchronously at some always-inconvenient time?
• Marazan 10y ago
  Interesting to see he thinks two weeks is the default sprint length. I thought 1 week was the default and it certainly works for my team. The various scrum meetings are short and snappy and have high value.
• apeace 10y ago
  This was my favorite point out of them all: > What about contributing to open-source software? Reading the code of an important external dependency, such as the web framework your team uses, and working on bugs or feature requests to get a better understanding was not part of any Scrum backlog I've ever seen. Working at various startups, I have developed a methodology of contributing back to open-source projects we use without accounting for it in sprints or the ticketing system. It involves getting to the office an hour early, over-estimating on my other tasks so I have time for something extra, and a sprinkle of office politics. And yet, it is some of the most valuable work I have done. Not for me, but for the companies I've worked for. To get an in-depth understanding of that one Django or Express.js feature you use, or even better, to find and fix a bug that affected the business or may have affected it in the future, just gives you that much more of an edge over your competitors. Say goodbye to that nasty workaround you had to use to get around the bug--now it Just Works exactly how you need it to! What's more, it's attractive to engineering candidates when you get to tell them the story of when you fixed a big bug in Socket.io. The best engineering managers I have had have been receptive to the idea that this type of research and/or contribution to other projects should be considered "work" that provides value to the business.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • icc97 10y ago
    Fixing a bug in OS software and consequently avoiding a workaround should count as double points in Scrum
    • slashblake 10y ago
      Biggest mistake in scrum is to give points for bug fixes, even if they're not yours.
• hawleyal 10y ago
  It's a project management methodology, not a software development methodology. Some of these gripes seem not to be accusations of the method but actually the application by whatever organization.
• pjbster 10y ago
  After working in Scrum for over a year, I find myself in violent agreement with every point in the article. For me, Scrum has always been nothing more than an “Agile Bootstrap”. The core idea within it is very simple: try something and examine the results. Stick with what works and try alternatives for what doesn’t. Repeat. And, above all, learn. So Scrum starts you off with a list of practices to get going with. The whole litany of backlogs, story points, sprints, daily stand ups and retrospectives is nothing more than a vocabulary - a pattern language for stakeholders. It’s got pros and cons - a good way to bring people together but it needs to be recognised as a crutch and ditched quickly before the team comes to treat it as an article of faith to be defended at all costs. And this is where so many agile coaches fail in my (limited) experience. When I was undergoing scrum training, it was hugely disappointing to hear colleagues asking questions of the trainer along the lines of “Can a scrum master multi-task among teams like an anaesthetist in a hospital?”. Or “What does Scrum advocate when a production incident requires someone in the team to drop out and assist?”. Or “Can we have scrums of scrums?”. The answer in every case is the same: try something - anything. See how it goes and decide whether to apply that approach again in future.
• obiefernandez 10y ago
  You'd love this https://medium.com/modern-agile https://medium.com/modern-agile
• deleted 10y ago
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• pbhowmic 10y ago
  What's the alternative? Give me a credible one and I will change my mind about Scrums. It's not great but I need an alternative, one that is better enough to abandon scrums.
• yclept 10y ago
  I feel like there's a standard blog post that can be posted in response to opinion pieces like this, and it would be titled "x is not a panacea".
• user5994461 10y ago
  Been doing scrum forever. Even before it existed. And yet I never had to use points, ever. Scrum Meeting: - Follow the list of topics for today ... (may include) ... Show progress and new features ... Get feedback ... Discuss blocking points and resources needs ... Get update on supplier status (if buying/selling anything to 3rd parties) - Decide what are the priorities for this week - Schedule the meeting for the next week (send the list of topics you'll talk about) That's overly trivial. It mostly comes down to schedule a meeting every 1-2 week, show/say current status, repeat... No need to call that scrum and put fancy names on it.
• speby 10y ago
  This article is, rightly so given the author, written from the perspective of an individual contributor on a Scrum team. First, the author refers to Scrum as a methodology. It is not. Scrum is a framework, and being based in agile principles, is much more about a way of thinking and working. It should not be used as a purely do-this-then-that prescriptive approach to getting software built. As we now can see, there many organizations that tout being "agile," when their true behaviors and output are merely agile window dressing. Also known as "fragile" instead of "agile." I disagree that Scrum is not useful to many organizations and teams. In particular, organizations that basically lack any process (trust me, I've been in a number of them) and it's kind of a free-for-all or based on whichever executive screams the loudest gets what they want when they want it. What is missing here is why Scrum can provide useful, especially in terms of velocity. A team's velocity can serve as an underlying basis for projecting how long things can take. Like it or not, internal "users" or "stakeholders" in an organization as well as many external ones expect to get some idea of when things are going to start happening and when things are going to be done happening, for particular features or commitments. As expected, this involves being able to at least intelligently (and based on historical data) make a reasonable prediction at dates. Entire books have been written about software estimation and no framework gets it right.
• inanutshellus 10y ago
  Alright, I know this has already dropped off the front page, but I figured I had something to offer to the conversation... First, as background, I'm a software engineer, not a "scrum coach" or anything, but I've been on a Scrum team for nine years and nine months. (I know, right? Our first Scrum project was Nov 2006. The set of people has fluctuated over the years but it's still a pretty tight ecosystem.) Just this morning we were requested to make videos about our team(s) to explain why we work so well, so this is pretty apropos. Second, I really did read the article through and thought it was well thought-out. Notably, I felt they came from a different mindset than mine, a different workplace, and I am a fan of Scrum, so here are my feedback points--I hope they're considered positive, helpful and constructive: TL;DR: I feel like the author is not empowered in his workplace. Time to upgrade your scrum team mindset. * Remember that a scrum team is self-organizing and self-managing. Specifically, I'm replying to: "The daily standup is in my opinion a manifestation of a significant but unspoken component of Scrum: Control" implies you don't know or don't practice this and is likely the actual source of your problems with Scrum. * You mention disliking pointing stories because they never match up with the points on tasks. Points on stories are done because you haven't created tasks yet, so you can't use task hours to add up to a story, and you need to figure out relative complexity before you start. * Getting points (RE: "I don't get the exact response that was expected, so no points for you.") - Here, the team decides whether it gets points, not a user in a review. That sounds weird, but so does a user saying "No points for you! (soup nazi voice)" in a review. Stick with me here: If you get feedback that says you need to do significant rework, it's clear there was a misunderstanding between your product owner and the business. Make a new backlog item, point it, prioritize it, move on. (If this happens more than once consider how far apart your vision is from your user and their vision of the project!) * Demoability as a requirement in Scrum (specifically responding to "How can you demo that your code base has become more habitable?") - Business folk understand the value of "plumbing" (pipes in your house aren't visible, but they sure are handy when you want to take a poo). They don't like showing up to meetings to talk about plumbing, though, so either skip that meeting entirely or tell them what will be possible when said plumbing is complete. Point is, don't die on the hill of demoability just to say "See! Scrum sucks! I can't demo all this plumbing!" * Meetings every two weeks - If they're painful, you're doing something wrong. If it's not ready, it doesn't go in the demo. Don't kill yourself for a demo. It may be a "sprint" but you're still actually in a marathon, so just pace yourself well. * You mentioned disconnected users. If you have bored users, get better about grouping the meeting. Split it into two meetings, if need be. We don't; we say "Hey, finance folk, you'll want to pay attention the first 15 minutes of the meeting then you can go. You're welcome to stay, but you'll see app features that won't affect you" * Daily Standup - For high-performing teams, the daily stand up is training wheels. Anything you learn in a daily standup should make you mad. ("Why did you wait til the daily stand up to tell me you [finished X|were blocked|needed this info|are ready for me to test]!"). Do them if you need to. If you do need them, ask yourself why. e.g. who isn't a communicator? Who would've blown you off were they not in this required meeting? Those guys are your blockade for more than just a daily scrum meeting. * Sprint durations - You make it sound like you don't have a choice. Your team chooses the duration of the sprint. * "I find the idea that you should get somewhere by sprinting repeatedly [and the rigidness of items in a sprint] rather weird." The rigidness is there to protect you from outside forces, not prevent your team from getting the job done. e.g. It's there to prevent the VP of Marketing from showing up and saying (psst, hey, could you add a blue link on the homepage?" .. "Oh, that link is wrong, make it into a popout." ... "oh, that popout should be a flash video" ... then suddenly you're missing your deadlines to the VP of Finance. It's there to give you a defense mechanism against folks above you trying to work-around their peers for your valuable time. * "The Scrum coach will find fifty ways of attacking each and every one of these topics, but all of them will be in the form of one more thing. One more meeting, one more document, one more backlog, one more item in the definition of done. " I don't think so, man. It's all about taking the training wheels off, not adding brakes. Maybe you have people working against you. Working against being in a team. In order to protect you from them you're all being laden with extra BS. For us, every painful thing that slowed us down was cut. Blocades were fired. The world got good. * "Every story in scrum has to end in customer value. [...] why even bother with refactoring?" The team can be a customer. "As a software engineer, I must refactor my [blah] to facilitate [blah]." No need to jump through artificial end-user-centric hoops. When/if you mention it outside the team, just hand-wave them and call it "plumbing." Everyone understands plumbing (as in, pipes in your house you can't see but appreciate every time you flush.) You still get points for work done, you still get value, you're still being a responsible engineer keeping their house clean. * "What is the job of a software developer? Writing code? I don't think so. I think it's inventing and customizing machine-executable abstractions" Not to be trite, but I'd say the job of a software engineer is to offer solutions to business problems. Usually this is by way of "I've got a hammer so let me hit that hangnail for you", but really, that's all we are, is problem solvers... but... shrug Re: Ideas for Alternatives: * "One way to achieve this might be putting work items through what I would call an algebra of complexity, i.e. an analysis of the sources of complexity in a work item and how they combine to create delays. The team could then study the backlog to locate the compositions that cause the most work and stress, and solve these knots to improve the codebase. The backlog would then resemble a network of equations, instead of a list of items, where solving one equation would simplify the others by replacing unknowns with more precise values." I'd love to see some practical examples of this. It sounds more complicated than the simple off-the-hip-shot estimates we get with points, but the idea has promise. * "The other proposal I would have is to get rid of the review, planning and stand-up meetings." You should be doing these judiciously anyway, not dogmatically. Free yourself of the chains of dogma and just do these when they have value. The thing is that they ARE good training wheels. If you're not in a high-performing team and you skip straight to "just do it when you need it" then you never get into practice, you never get used to them, you ... never do them. They do have value, and you should do them when you can demonstrate value in them. So... Ascend when you're ready to.
• geeklover 10y ago
  We use Kanban among our team. Our favourite tool is www.kanbanery.com It helps us with our everyday work and lets us to track our progress. Before we started working on a kanban board we always had a problem to kick off our huge projects. Now, we cnvert plans & ideas into doable tasks, so you can easily kick off your projece. We love working with Kanbanery because it has many features that make our work easier, like: priority & estimation markers to show how important and complex a particular task is. In case of bottlenecks, instead of sending a long email with an explanation, use the blocker attribute to let your team know what’s going on. So all in all I still think that Scrum & Kanban can make your life easier.