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That sounds like poorly run scrum more than anything else. I can't count the number of times I've thrown an "investigation" task on the backlog that may or may

That sounds like poorly run scrum more than anything else. I can't count the number of times I've thrown an "investigation" task on the backlog that may or may not have panned out. Scrum is more about keeping your fellow engineers informed on what they are working on so incompatible things rise quickly. It shouldn't be used as a tool for micro management but instead reviewed at the end of each sprint.

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago
> You're doing it wrong. This is the nonfalsifiability of a religion surfacing. THIS is the problem. This very thing. The implement is ALWAYS blamed.
zukzuk 9y ago
And this is exactly why "agile" has become a religion more than anything — if it's not working, it's because you're doing it wrong. You just need to agile harder.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Well, there are no absolutes in this industry, if there were then we all wouldn't have a job since it would just be paint by numbers. If a process isn't getting you what you want then change it. Is it any wonder that repeating a broken process gets you broken results each time?
- Bahamut 9y ago
  To be fair, it really does sound like bad management - management shouldn’t be blasting an individual during scrum. Management also shouldn’t care if other work gets done as long as the core commitments get finished. Good management shouldn’t hamstring you like that - engineering doesn’t work like that. That is regardless of agile or whatever development methodology you use.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Management really shouldn't even be participating in any of the scrum meetings other than the sprint review. All of the other meetings are supposed to be just for the team itself.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I've never seen agile work with sprints. Things change too fast and usually there are unknowns. I have seen Kanban work because it takes into account the reality that priorities change, and estimates are never accurate. I am also a big believer in hard short deadlines when it comes to doing releases. When the deadline comes, release what you have ready and put it behind a feature toggle if needed to do a phased rollout.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  If it's not working, why isn't it addressed in the retrospective? If you have a proper retrospective, you can change anything, even going from scrum to kanban.
  - mmcnl 9y ago
    This is 100% true. Who is holding you back to address things if they aren't working? I've literally never in my professional life have encountered a situation where honest feedback wasn't appreciated. If you encounter situations where you are being micromanaged, try to place yourself in the role of the one who is micromanaging and try to see his challenges. That person is just somebody who is trying do his best. No one wants to suck the joy and energy out of his or her colleagues.
Retra 9y ago
There is very little you have to add to "keeping everyone informed of what you are doing" to end up at micromanagement.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Notice I said engineers and not management or everyone, very small but important difference.
  - overgard 9y ago
    The thing is though, the number of times I've seen engineers work on conflicting/redundant things without realizing it (outside of the agile/scrum environment) has been vanishingly small. And the places I've seen it it's always been on separate teams that would never have been part of the same scrum group in the first place (ie, it was an inter-team problem rather than an intra-team problem)
    - CountSessine 9y ago
      This rings true for me. At one of my former employers our scrum masters came up with this idea of a ‘scrum-of-scrums’ where team leads would get together once every month and have a standup to talk about things they’re working on that could affect other teams. But it became a painful waste of time because some of the participants didn’t understand that we didn’t want to hear them talk about every single task their team worked on. Then we tried ‘release-train’ planning where the whole company would do 2 day company-stand ups. That was even worse. The real problem was that the company had a weird cultural and engineering mismatch between hardware and software engineers and the upper management was too clueless and careless to coordinate between them.
overgard 9y ago
The problem with "investigation" tasks or "spikes" is that it still boils down to essentially having to ask permission to do something. I really think extreme one-sided work transparency and a culture where everything is measured and permission has to be sought to work on something is entirely antithetical to encouraging creativity. Innovation tends to come from playfulness, and having to schedule a Jira task with a project manager for every idea is going to have a chilling effect.
- goalieca 9y ago
  You’ve hit my first main point of hatred against agile. It’s really a form of micromanaging in disguise. They sell it as developer empowerment but that’s just cognitive dissonance.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    That depends on the company. Some companies (in my experience) do engineer-only scrums where programmers can talk about their blockers and ask for advice from seniors; others do mixed scrums where the engineers are basically reporting their progress to the product manager or someone, and where often technical questions are discouraged. I'd tend to think the latter are "doing it wrong", but then again, who am I to say? I just know I much preferred working for the companies who did it the former way.
    - watwut 9y ago
      This idea that only managers micromanage and fellow engineers never do that us one of biggest agile fallacies. Also, need to ask question should not require whole team meeting.
  - mmcnl 9y ago
    This is not a problem of agile, it's a problem with the implementation of agile. A company that tends to micromanage that implements agile will use agile to micromanage. It's unavoidable.
lliamander 9y ago
When I've done R&D in an agile setting, usually the research was done outside of the scrum process, and once that was done then the development would be done in a standard scrum methodology. The reason you can't really apply "Agile" to research is that having a useful product at the end of each sprint is a central to Agile development but runs contrary to the purpose of research. Now, you still need to manage your research process. You need to identify the specific research questions you need to answer, and you need to bound the time investment. But let's not try too hard to shoehorn a methodology primarily oriented towards IT consulting into every other domain.
0x445442 9y ago
How many points did you give those tasks? We're the points agreed upon by the team? Did the team and the business agree to the tasks being included in the Sprint during Sprint planning? It sounds like you created the tasks yourself and added them to the backlog mid-sprint. If that's what you did I'd be totally cool with it but I can tell you a lot of "agile shops" would blow a gasket over that.

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago

> You're doing it wrong. This is the nonfalsifiability of a religion surfacing. THIS is the problem. This very thing. The implement is ALWAYS blamed.

zukzuk 9y ago

And this is exactly why "agile" has become a religion more than anything — if it's not working, it's because you're doing it wrong. You just need to agile harder.

vvanders 9y ago
Well, there are no absolutes in this industry, if there were then we all wouldn't have a job since it would just be paint by numbers. If a process isn't getting you what you want then change it. Is it any wonder that repeating a broken process gets you broken results each time?
Bahamut 9y ago
To be fair, it really does sound like bad management - management shouldn’t be blasting an individual during scrum. Management also shouldn’t care if other work gets done as long as the core commitments get finished. Good management shouldn’t hamstring you like that - engineering doesn’t work like that. That is regardless of agile or whatever development methodology you use.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Management really shouldn't even be participating in any of the scrum meetings other than the sprint review. All of the other meetings are supposed to be just for the team itself.
scarface74 9y ago
I've never seen agile work with sprints. Things change too fast and usually there are unknowns. I have seen Kanban work because it takes into account the reality that priorities change, and estimates are never accurate. I am also a big believer in hard short deadlines when it comes to doing releases. When the deadline comes, release what you have ready and put it behind a feature toggle if needed to do a phased rollout.
koonsolo 9y ago
If it's not working, why isn't it addressed in the retrospective? If you have a proper retrospective, you can change anything, even going from scrum to kanban.
- mmcnl 9y ago
  This is 100% true. Who is holding you back to address things if they aren't working? I've literally never in my professional life have encountered a situation where honest feedback wasn't appreciated. If you encounter situations where you are being micromanaged, try to place yourself in the role of the one who is micromanaging and try to see his challenges. That person is just somebody who is trying do his best. No one wants to suck the joy and energy out of his or her colleagues.

Retra 9y ago

There is very little you have to add to "keeping everyone informed of what you are doing" to end up at micromanagement.

vvanders 9y ago
Notice I said engineers and not management or everyone, very small but important difference.
- overgard 9y ago
  The thing is though, the number of times I've seen engineers work on conflicting/redundant things without realizing it (outside of the agile/scrum environment) has been vanishingly small. And the places I've seen it it's always been on separate teams that would never have been part of the same scrum group in the first place (ie, it was an inter-team problem rather than an intra-team problem)
  - CountSessine 9y ago
    This rings true for me. At one of my former employers our scrum masters came up with this idea of a ‘scrum-of-scrums’ where team leads would get together once every month and have a standup to talk about things they’re working on that could affect other teams. But it became a painful waste of time because some of the participants didn’t understand that we didn’t want to hear them talk about every single task their team worked on. Then we tried ‘release-train’ planning where the whole company would do 2 day company-stand ups. That was even worse. The real problem was that the company had a weird cultural and engineering mismatch between hardware and software engineers and the upper management was too clueless and careless to coordinate between them.

overgard 9y ago

The problem with "investigation" tasks or "spikes" is that it still boils down to essentially having to ask permission to do something. I really think extreme one-sided work transparency and a culture where everything is measured and permission has to be sought to work on something is entirely antithetical to encouraging creativity. Innovation tends to come from playfulness, and having to schedule a Jira task with a project manager for every idea is going to have a chilling effect.

goalieca 9y ago
You’ve hit my first main point of hatred against agile. It’s really a form of micromanaging in disguise. They sell it as developer empowerment but that’s just cognitive dissonance.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  That depends on the company. Some companies (in my experience) do engineer-only scrums where programmers can talk about their blockers and ask for advice from seniors; others do mixed scrums where the engineers are basically reporting their progress to the product manager or someone, and where often technical questions are discouraged. I'd tend to think the latter are "doing it wrong", but then again, who am I to say? I just know I much preferred working for the companies who did it the former way.
  - watwut 9y ago
    This idea that only managers micromanage and fellow engineers never do that us one of biggest agile fallacies. Also, need to ask question should not require whole team meeting.
- mmcnl 9y ago
  This is not a problem of agile, it's a problem with the implementation of agile. A company that tends to micromanage that implements agile will use agile to micromanage. It's unavoidable.

lliamander 9y ago

When I've done R&D in an agile setting, usually the research was done outside of the scrum process, and once that was done then the development would be done in a standard scrum methodology. The reason you can't really apply "Agile" to research is that having a useful product at the end of each sprint is a central to Agile development but runs contrary to the purpose of research. Now, you still need to manage your research process. You need to identify the specific research questions you need to answer, and you need to bound the time investment. But let's not try too hard to shoehorn a methodology primarily oriented towards IT consulting into every other domain.

0x445442 9y ago

How many points did you give those tasks? We're the points agreed upon by the team? Did the team and the business agree to the tasks being included in the Sprint during Sprint planning? It sounds like you created the tasks yourself and added them to the backlog mid-sprint. If that's what you did I'd be totally cool with it but I can tell you a lot of "agile shops" would blow a gasket over that.