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> What? I don't assume Scrum should or can fix bad management practices. What? Scrum fixes all bad management practices? > I'm saying adding Scrum to already-

• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > What? Scrum fixes all bad management practices? What are you saying here? I was questioning your original statement that I mistakenly thought Scrum should fix bad management practices. I do not think that, and no part of that is a criticism of Scrum. The criticisms are other things. Your follow-up just seems confused about your own parent comment. > "There we need evidence that it is actually so. Haven't seen any convincing data for that." I've seen a lot of that evidence, in threads like this, in the original post, and also empirical evidence in my own work experience with Scrum as both a developer and a manager across several organizations of various ages and sizes. I'm not asking anyone to take my word for it though. I'm happy to look into randomized controlled studies about effectiveness of engineering teams with or without Scrum. Much like with open-plan offices, I'm confident the evidence shows zero efficacy (despite huge planning overhead costs and time wasters) for using Scrum even after controlling for whatever confounders you think are the scapegoats for Scrum's badness. It's a good thing we don't have to worry about what you've seen as our standard of evidence for discussing this topic, and we're free to make useful written arguments and discussions, like the linked post in the OP, that also appeal to important qualitative aspects of the problem, like how developers are disempowered, or how management always misuses Scrum-related progress tracking data. > "The sentence before claimed something else: Scrum makes it worse, quickly." This is pedantic to the point of making me suspect you're just trolling to argue with anyone who doesn't like Scrum. Yes, indeed, two different sentences claimed two separate but compatible and related things. Shocking! > "True, but that's not the case. Scrum can be used with advantage in average to good companies" You're demanding evidence but then just making equally unsubstantiated claims in the opposite direction. What's to say that instances of well-delivered software you've seen weren't done in spite of Scrum rather than because of it. That would need evidence too. And particularly because Scrum requires a far-reaching and globally prescriptive implementation (e.g. do team planning exactly this way and exactly on this timeline, estimate your workload exactly like this, use exactly these meetings, etc.) it strongly suggests the burden of proof is on Scrum proponents to explain why this is better than customized, individually and organically developed workflows that teams use because they are demonstrably working for them. > "Scrum is really on a tiny framework addressing a few basic things in small team organization." This is abject nonsense. Even a framework that did nothing but prescribe that teams must do some form of estimation every X weeks would be hugely overbearing bloatware. Scrum goes so much further, prescribing a huge overhead of different meetings, a bunch of specific named positions that have to have specific responsibilities in teams, and overbearing principles that superficially look small in writing but really are huge bureaucratic nightmares, like mandating that all teams should be cross-functional, which is totally disconnected from business realities in many cases, especially for teams whose sole business value is highly specialized domain area. > "Personally I'd rather work in a company willing to learn how to successfully develop software in some reproduceable way." This presumes that there always exists some "reproducible way", and that it is one-size-fits-all for the a whole company. You're just denying the premise that customized, situation-specific or team-specific workflows could be the right way. It's fine if you want to deny that claim as a personal preference or opinion, but you're just taking that as your own assumption, and then tacitly basing various claims about the superiority of Scrum on this built-in, hidden assumption.
  • lispm 8y ago
    > I've seen a lot of that evidence, in threads like this, in the original post, and also empirical evidence in my own work experience with Scrum as both a developer and a manager across several organizations of various ages and sizes. 'evidence' found in Hackernews posts? > I'm confident the evidence shows zero efficacy this will surely help with selecting evidence, given that you know already the findings. > This is pedantic to the point of making me suspect you're just trolling to argue with anyone who doesn't like Scrum. Yes, indeed, two different sentences claimed two separate but compatible and related things. Shocking! How about deciding what you want to say: a) scrum makes it worse or b) scrum does not help? > This is abject nonsense. Really? Before we have worked with RUP and Agile RUP. Compared to that Scrum is tiny. > like mandating that all teams should be cross-functional, which is totally disconnected from business realities in many cases, especially for teams whose sole business value is highly specialized domain area. The team should be cross-functional based on the product the team develops. > This presumes that there always exists some "reproducible way" This actually presumes that I identify successful practices which can be applied in many projects. We did. > You're just denying the premise that customized, situation-specific or team-specific workflows could be the right way. No, I'm not denying it, but when my team had success with Continuous Integration, I probably would use that in the next project - when applicable. It would also be a surprise if in a new project I would need to start from scratch to completely redesign workflows and team communication, without any prior knowledge/practices applicable. I've worked for a few decades in software projects and in software consulting - often I was responsible for project and team setups. Often developing new stuff. I can easily imagine that other domains work differently.
    • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      > "How about deciding what you want to say: a) scrum makes it worse or b) scrum does not help?" Both! > "Really? Before we have worked with RUP and Agile RUP. Compared to that Scrum is tiny." Nuclear submarines are tiny because aircraft carriers are large. And this means submarines are a good investment. > "The team should be cross-functional based on the product the team develops." This is ignoring reality in many cases. A team might develop something domain-specific, like a natural language processing algorithm, but then later the product requires a web service and a front-end. As a result, management requires specialist machine learning researchers to spend their time writing front-end widgets, because "Scrum says to be cross-functional" (and don't even think of saying the no-true-Scotsman reply, "but that means they're doing Scrum wrong!" Scrum leads them to that type of thinking). In many cases, the different functionalities for a single product should absolutely not be embedded in the same team. Rather, much like in software design, it's important to separate concerns, and have teams with modular and clearly defined boundaries between their different and complementary skills. Then for a single product, parts of it will be worked on by different teams that each have specialized skill in one area, and can operate independently of each other because it's not muddied by an artificial requirement for "cross-functional" skills. Some other times, Scrum-like cross-functionality is good. That's why Scrum is wrong to unilaterally prescribe it for every product and every situation. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, and teams need to be empowered to customize according to whatever the case at hand needs, not the unilateral model that Scrum tries to impose. > "This actually presumes that I identify successful practices which can be applied in many projects. We did." But then what do you say to people who have identified successful practices over decades that conflict with Scrum and are mutually exclusive with Scrum's approach. Scrum worked for you. Great. It didn't work for me. What's your reaction to that fact? If your reaction is to say, "well then you did Scrum wrong, because it always works" then you are just denying the premise that any other solution could be possible, and it absolutely is a No True Scotsman fallacy. Can you at least admit that some people have earnestly tried Scrum in a situation when Scrum is advertised to work, like iterative software development, and they did not "do it wrong" yet still found that it didn't work for their team?