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Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if yo
by lzw 16y ago
Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally talked to each other when we needed to, with no annoying scrum meetings and asinine bs from managers. People say managers have no voice at scrums, but what is a scrum master anyway? Everyone who doesn't write code is a manager and their opinion can interfere with progress. And of course the idiot child product manager would constantly lecture people about talking too much, except she would never shut up herself.
Even if a meeting is 15 minutes, if it is irritating, insulting, distracting and undermining, then it negatively impacts productivity for at least an hour after. I took to. Having breakfast afterwards, where I normally wouldn't eat breakfast, just to get centered so I could get some work done for the rest of the day.
I left that company soon after. If I had stayed i would have gone postal, or had to hire a lawyer to sue them under the ADA for torturing me by making me stand and listen to sanctimonious bullshit from idiots.
People say, when a bad experience is described that it wasn't being done right. Well i see no difference between what i experienced and what is being advocated.
Yes, there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.
That said, on my own we've adopted a number of so-called agile methodologies like incremental and iterative development.
But the whole movement I'd oriented around imposing ideology on people. This is wrong.
For instance, whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true, but I would never say there is ONE TRUE WAY. Agile proponents often seem to say there is only ONE TRUE WAY.
Also, don't mod me down just because I work differently to you. This is the ideology of the ONE TRUE WAY that is just wrong.
Programmers come in all shapes and sizes. They actually can be productive and work in a different than I do or you do.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI (the author) agree with you. I also do not like this whole idea of ONE TRUE WAY. From the closing graphs. Iterative and incremental development isn't for everybody. Lots of teams do things completely ad-hoc. Lots of teams are happy with waterfall. Lots of folks just don't care to change. These are all good reasons why agile might be a bad idea. My standard for what agile isn't universal, sure. but I'm very happy teaching best practices for iterative and incremental development. You can call that agile, you can call it Joe. Whatever it is, helping people see things and try things they haven't seen or tried before -- and then letting them decide whether it's working for them or not... Over time there can be an us-versus-them attitude that sets up between any two groups of people. We must always be on guard for this. If you're not a servant to the team, you shouldn't be in the room.
- lzw 16y agoSure, didn't mean to come off as disagreeing with you, as your article makes many of the same points. Just venting because so much of these ideas have become an ideology....I respect that you are advocating a non-ideological approach.
- brown9-2 16y agowhenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true Can you elaborate on what you mean by this last part?
- kgo 16y agoSomeone who insists on a single silver bullet is probably incompetent.
- api 16y agoThe biggest determinant of success that I've seen is the skill of the programmers on the team. No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period. (However, really bad management can make good programmers write crappy code too...)
- cageface 16y agoExactly! Factors contributing to the success of a development project, in decreasing order of importance: 1. the skill of the team 2. the determination of the team to succeed 3. appropriate choice of technologies 4. process In my experience management agendas are much more likely to interfere with 1-4 than to help. There needs to be some kind of hippocratic oath for development managers and process enthusiasts. Everybody pays lip service to Fred Brooks but people somehow seem to keep forgetting his message.
- api 16y agoThey're forgetting it because they want to forget it. Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers. This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and promises to allow programmers to become commodities is going to catch on like wildfire. The desire is too strong from a management perspective. It doesn't matter how many times such efforts have failed in the past. What's old will become new again.
- ww520 16y agoExactly. Agile becomes popular because it gives managers wetdream to impose a factory-like process into software development.
- gamble 16y agoNot to mention that it appears to eliminate the long "measuring before you cut" thing at the start of new projects. Fingers on keyboards equals productivity!
- haze 16y agoBeing Agile has become a fad off late. This has led to team adopting agile blindly doing things without understanding the reason or need behind it. This could lead to frustration mentioned by you involving a lot of long ass meetings standing. I believe as mentioned in the article that Agile is a set of best practices followed by a ever adaptive team. I completely agree there is in no ONE TRUE WAY.
- moondowner 16y agoTrue, It can disorganize the team and make it counterproductive if it isn't in the 'agile' mindset (or hasn't adapted to it in a reasonable period of time).
- weego 16y agoWe implemented it because one of the teams we work with implemented it. The big difference no one cared to notice was that they work in terms of iterative builds of a huge application that they determine the timescales of, and we work on learning products that have prescribed deadlines, sometimes down to "this needs to be done this afternoon for tomorrow morning". We were still forced to estimate the effort of something that we knew had to be done the same day, and it was to be done by the person who had free time, no the person who it would be the least effort for. No surprise it was a completely hollow experience.
- njharman 16y agoDid you even read the article?
- snorkel 16y agoThe gaping vulnerability in the traditional ad-hoc waterfall approach is management is constantly interrupting work in progress and changing the priorities, then wondering aloud why nothing ever seems to get done. Agile is certainly worth the bureaucratic hassles it adds because agile protects developers from the tyranny of ever-changing priorities. At the start of each iteration (every 4 weeks or so) the management team must agree that these issues, and only these issues, will be the entirety of what the team works on for that iteration, no exceptions, no additions, no interruptions. A good management team will respect that agreement and protect the team from interruptions.
- PotatoEngineer 16y agoThis can be solved simply by explaining to your management that Change == Things Will Be Late. If your management can't understand this, then it's unlikely that they'll be able to commit to Agile, anyway.
- loewenskind 16y agoBut using Agile allows you to show this in concrete terms. Waterfall uses the "man hours/months/years" metric which is useless given the difference in productivity between developers. Agile, on the other hand, shows the output that is occurring on average, i.e. what you're realistically going to get. What I tell people is: what do you want? Do you want to never be told no, but never get what you were promised? Then use waterfall. Do you want to usually get what was promised, but be told you can't have what ever you want? Then use Scrum.
- huherto 16y agoyes, and the worst part is when the pointy haired bosses become Agile experts and start to look down on software developers. They couldn't write an application even to save their lives but now they feel they are the experts and try to manage the developers.
- gaius 16y agoExactly. IMHO the role of the Scrum Master only really exists during the daily standup. The rest of the time that guy should be coding with everyone else.
- rickmb 16y agoYou know what one of the core values of Agile is? People over process. For fuck sake, the reason the Agile Manifesto came into being in the first place because the people writing it, the people who created various methodologies now known as "Agile", agreed that there was no ONE TRUE WAY, just a set a values they shared. Each and every one of them would agree with you. This willful misunderstanding of agile is just pathetic. It's like listing to teabaggers going on about death panels.
- lzw 16y agoBack when that is what agile was, I was all for it. But it had become a dogma, just like the dogma that causes you to lie about the tea party and obamacare- you don't carewhat reality is.
- gsharm 16y agoThank you, my experience has been same, and I could have not said this better. I'd like to add that anyone in this position should do exactly what you and I did, and quit. Time is valuable. Leave them to find out the error of their ways by themselves if they're unwilling to listen. They'll think you're wrong. You'll think they're wrong. Fine. Let the free market work it out. I now work as a contracter elsewhere, solving more worthy and interesting problems, and with wonderful coworkers. Our methodology adapts as required to the problems we are trying to solve. We're incredibly productive and love our jobs, because we think about the product we're trying to create and not about following arbitrary rules in lockstep. The way to overcome incompetence isn't to fight it but leapfrog it entirely.
- WorkerBee 16y agothere is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility. the interesting thing is that the agile movement started as exactly the reverse of what you said: as a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility, not a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose. If your experience is the opposite, you've been had by someone, and you're blaming agile. whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true The reverse would be "anyone doing unit tests in incompetent", which is not a defendable statement. What are you trying to say?
- loewenskind 16y agoWow, it's pretty surprising to see such a rant get so many upvotes. Your rant is about a bad company (good on you for quitting) but it has nothing to do with Scrum. You're right that there is for sure no "one true way". For me, I like (the parts I use of) Scrum because (a) it puts a low limit on how long a project can veer off track without anyone noticing (i.e. you can only lose SCRUM_LENGTH time at once, not years) and (b) it puts up a wall that stops business from just coming over interrupting me everything some bright idea pops in their head (they can do this if they wish but it means canceling the current scrum. Usually this is enough to make sure they don't do this for trivial stuff). Maybe one reason I like it is because I'm the kind of person who always sees "rules" as guidelines, not things to be followed rigorously in all cases.