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Capital-A-Agile puts a lot of emphasis on very fine-grained collaboration and reducing the amount of time people are "doing their own thing". Some advocates ar

by dasmoth 10y ago

Capital-A-Agile puts a lot of emphasis on very fine-grained collaboration and reducing the amount of time people are "doing their own thing". Some advocates are pretty open about this being a form of micromanagement[1]. Some people thrive in high-visibility, fine-grained-collaboration environments. On the other hand, if you've got people who are already doing good work without many meetings, it's hard to see Scrum-flavoured setups being anything other than intrusive. [1] https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ssssh....agile-is-all-about-micromanaging https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ssssh....agile-is-...

Underqualified 10y ago
Micromanagement is indeed what it looked like to me with all the daily stand ups (what did you do yesterday), review meetings (what did you do last week ?), scoring (what do you mean it would take you longer than that other developer to finish something ?) and sprints (we HAVE to do this THIS WEEK).
- jwdunne 10y ago
  That's certainly what it can be used for and probably is on a large scale. The most important one that a lot seem to miss is the "did you face any road blocks?", with a culture where the whole team thinks and removes the roadblock such that it is removed for everybody for good. Morphine is a pretty damn good painkiller. Unfortunately, it is extremely easy to abuse to the point where there are more people abuse it than people who genuinely benefit from it. On a larger scale, communism as it was originally conceived sounds like a utopia. Unfortunately, the only thing that's actually happened is an abuse that takes anything from democracy to authoritarian regimes well towards totalitarianism, the anti-thesis of communism. Scrum and agile is the same in that respect. Sounds great. Works well on paper but very rarely used correctly or with the original intention.
maxxxxx 10y ago
That's what turned me away from Scrum. When you do something really difficult you end up reporting the same thing for weeks. Or you feel you shouldn't even try something difficult because you can't break down into little daily chunks. I prefer my people solve difficult problems and not just little bite-sized tasks that only touch the surface of the system.
overgard 10y ago
That blog post is really odd. It's like "sure you're being micromanaged, but its by a mob instead of a tyrant", as though thats a comforting thing. How is that better?! You cant just throw the word "team" in there and pretend it makes things ok.

by dasmoth 10y ago

Underqualified 10y ago

Micromanagement is indeed what it looked like to me with all the daily stand ups (what did you do yesterday), review meetings (what did you do last week ?), scoring (what do you mean it would take you longer than that other developer to finish something ?) and sprints (we HAVE to do this THIS WEEK).

jwdunne 10y ago
That's certainly what it can be used for and probably is on a large scale. The most important one that a lot seem to miss is the "did you face any road blocks?", with a culture where the whole team thinks and removes the roadblock such that it is removed for everybody for good. Morphine is a pretty damn good painkiller. Unfortunately, it is extremely easy to abuse to the point where there are more people abuse it than people who genuinely benefit from it. On a larger scale, communism as it was originally conceived sounds like a utopia. Unfortunately, the only thing that's actually happened is an abuse that takes anything from democracy to authoritarian regimes well towards totalitarianism, the anti-thesis of communism. Scrum and agile is the same in that respect. Sounds great. Works well on paper but very rarely used correctly or with the original intention.

maxxxxx 10y ago

That's what turned me away from Scrum. When you do something really difficult you end up reporting the same thing for weeks. Or you feel you shouldn't even try something difficult because you can't break down into little daily chunks. I prefer my people solve difficult problems and not just little bite-sized tasks that only touch the surface of the system.

overgard 10y ago

That blog post is really odd. It's like "sure you're being micromanaged, but its by a mob instead of a tyrant", as though thats a comforting thing. How is that better?! You cant just throw the word "team" in there and pretend it makes things ok.