22 ms·

Scrum is fragile, not Agile

• makach 7y ago
  uh oh, is this the one article that will make people go "A-HA, told you so?" #confirmation-bias and, I never saw so much interpretation of what something should be as with Agile. not everyone is entitled to say or mean something, that includes myself and this post.
• marsrover 7y ago
  Scrum is micromanagement. I think it’s as simple as that.
  • verinus 7y ago
    no this is completely and entirely wrong. on the contrary: you have a PO in charge of communication and priorization of features and a dev team in charge of developing- no manager on top...at least in theory...
• clumsysmurf 7y ago
  At the company I work at, we have the following scrum anti-patterns. I wish I knew, whether we could "do scrum right" or just move onto something simpler (fta; priority queue) * Daily standup, nobody wants to be at. We have multiple teams arrive, with roughly 20 people in a small room. Some people stand, some people sit. Sometimes the front-end team goes, sometimes the back-end team goes. Its limited to 15 minutes, so nobody says much of importance, and just parrots what is already on the Jira board. * Scrum master driving process above scrum. The scrum master's role is to make sure scrum rules are adhered to. But at this company, any deviation from scrum itself poses a threat to this person's job security, so it doesn't happen. More high-level processes are not optimized because the scrum master defines everything. * Technical debt. I see this time and time again. User Stories are supposed to be forecasts, not commitments. But the business doesn't like stories carried over, so they become commitments. At the end of each sprint, everyone rushes to get their stuff done, and hacks are implemented to meet an arbitrary deadline. Many times I want to begin my work by refactoring something to what it needs to be first, then do the actual user story. But its risky because the refactoring might take more than the allocated story points, and you get dinged. So I do the story first, and if there is time do the refactoring but it almost never happens. * Poor product owners. During maintenance phase, we could work on cleaning up technical debt, but this value is not appreciated by business so they keep us busy with bikeshedding. One gripe I have about scrum, is there is nobody representing engineering, as the product owner represents the business. These things combined have dragged down the happiness of the people I work with, but we all feel imprisoned by it. I have a stack of scrum books here I plan on reading, I figure this process isn't going away and I need to up my game with how to play it - but I wish I could use something else, perhaps kanban.
  • icelancer 7y ago
    > Daily standup I have never worked at a company where this actually goes right and could not be replaced by [insert ticketing system here]. We use Basecamp to do daily check-ins on a very high priority issue, if we have one, which we usually don't.
    • thrower123 7y ago
      Managers are the only people that like daily standups, so far as I can tell. I've never figured out why you couldn't just do it over slack or equivalent. It's massively inefficient to get everyone to meet up in the morning.
      • detaro 7y ago
        Many places do it over Slack.
      • rdtsc 7y ago
        Managers need to justify their jobs. Reading off a slack report every day seems too simple and not worthy the salary they're paid. Compare that to a large meeting and live status updates, everyone stands, etc. Now that is some "serious work" happening. Think of it from the point of view that managers have mangers they report to. When shit goes wrong they have to cover their asses. "So it's late. But did you check on their progress? Wait just over slack, no actual meetings? Ok, that obviously needs improvement".
        • tomjakubowski 7y ago
          It's not like it's a requirement that "managers" be at a standup meeting. Some of the best teams I've worked on have done daily standups without managers, and I dare to say most of us enjoyed them and found them productive!
          • asark 7y ago
            Managers are often looking for ways to fill their calendar. Meetings, calls that could be a two-minute Slack exchange, et c. Some will hop into meetings like that if they can. They love the recurring ones, especially, bonus if they can apologize any time they have to skip it for something that actually, maybe, matters ("uh, yeah, we don't care if you come, OK, thanks for apologizing I guess?")
• fenwick67 7y ago
  In my very surface-level, western understanding of Chinese philosophy, Agile seems very much like Taoism and Scrum is like Confucianism, in several ways. The Agile Manifesto describes a set of ideals but gives no true set of instructions to follow, to do so would not be the Agile way. More than anything, it prescribes an attitude around which you should generally approach things. Scrum conversely gives rules for how things can be organized and executed in a functional organization. It gives little room for flexibility. Any problems you have with Scrum, the first reaction should be "how are we following the rules wrong?". Similarly, Tao and Agile are ideals for the individuals (and small teams), Confucianism and Scrum are rules for getting things to work functionally within a society/company.
  • ineedasername 7y ago
    The comparison may be very apt. After all, a key tenet of Taoism is that the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. It may very well be that an Agile development process that can be fully specified and documented is not truly Agile.
    • erik_seaberg 7y ago
      Somehow I'm reminded of "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" but I'm not sure which side it supports.
  • mjcohen 7y ago
    Sounds like Theodore Sturgeon's description of the difference between morality and ethics in his classic "More than Human": Morality is society's rules for individual survival. Ethics is the individual's rules for society's survival.
• h0l0cube 7y ago
  Relevant: https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html
• orangeshark 7y ago
  I don't really have that much industry experience but have been reading a lot about development processes and practices. It seems there just isn't one development process that will solve all your problems and allow you always create successful software. To me it seems you just need to find what works for your team and continuously work on improving on it. What might work today, probably won't work for your team tomorrow so you need to always look at how can you improve your process. ACM recently had a series of webinars[0] by Ivar Jacobson on Essence[1]. Essence was kind of confusing at first, but it is essentially a language to describe practices from the different processes. The idea is that you can build up a library of the various practices in your company and allow teams to pick their own and evolve their process by swapping out practices that just don't work out. Essence seems like an interesting idea, especially if it allows teams to create a development process that fits them. [0]: https://www.sigsoft.org/resources/webinars.html https://www.sigsoft.org/resources/webinars.html [1]: https://www.ivarjacobson.com/services/what-essence https://www.ivarjacobson.com/services/what-essence
  • Const-me 7y ago
    I have decades of industry experience and I mostly agree. > find what works for your team For the combination of team and project. Different software projects need to take very different tradeoffs in how they managed. Use scrum in aerospace for flight control, and people will die. Use scrum for system software, and you'll have hard time delivering quality and performance, system software often requires non-trivial amount of engineering. Implement NASA's best practices when working on videogame or web app, and you'll blow budget. This article is from 2002 but still good: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/
  • jon-wood 7y ago
    You may not have much industry experience, but you’ve managed to hit the core of the problem. There is no one process that will work for every team, or even every project. Every team at my workplace runs a different process. We’ve got a team developing new features who are running an iterative agile process, allowing them to react to changes ok requirements or unexpected issues with as little disruption as possible. We’ve also got a team doing B2B projects, essentially rebranding our mobile apps and platform for different companies, and that’s pretty traditional waterfall - I wouldn’t in a million years use waterfall for new features, but when you’re running through a set of well understood tasks that need delivering on schedule to coincide with work by third parties it gets the job done.
• patothon 7y ago
  Are we still talking about these dated concepts? Agile is a mindset. Understand the mindset, absorb it, make it yours, and build the process that's working for you based on that mindset. Stop complaining about Scrum, it's just a tool, and tools deprecate.
  • jillesvangurp 7y ago
    Yep, I've never been in a team where the process was not a regular topic of debate. Once it stops being a topic of debate, it actually just means people are no longer adapting. I prefer a good dose of pragmatism here. Changing the rules all the time is very draining on team morale. Similarly not adapting to obvious process issues is equally demoralizing. Since everyone is doing, or claims to be doing, agile, the whole notion is completely meaningless. Unless they are actively advertising to be doing some form of waterfall, you can safely assume there is some notion of iterations involved. What matters more these days is whether the team is mature enough to have continuous deployment without process bureaucracy. Deployment fear is a good sign the process sucks. If you have a need for human gatekeepers, something is wrong with the test automation. Deploying often and with confidence is a good sign you are dealing with a smoothly running team.
• wpietri 7y ago
  He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption. I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable. I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies have other priorities than being effective, so the processes that dominate will reflect those priorities. On average, the first priority of managers and execs is maintaining the power structures that make them a big deal. But true Agile processes are about empowering teams to self-organize around serving users. Ergo, Sturgeon's Law [2] applies here too: 90% of company software process is crap. I think reason why Scrum in specific won out is that it combined a process framework unthreatening to executives with the multilevel marketing scheme of Scrum certification. Executives got to keep doing what they were doing, the workers got a "didn't stop breathing" certificate, and coaches got paid. Win, win, win! [1] http://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-an... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  • abraae 7y ago
    Scrum won out IMO because it's an awesome word and conjures up subliminal images of brute force pushing obstacles out of the way, bringing success to the team. Execs can relate to it without even knowing what it is.
    • patothon 7y ago
      I actually think scrum won because of its multiple rituals that allowed most of middle managers and project managers to keep their job by recycling it.
    • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      I think it won out because the number one thing any kind of project management framework has to provide is ambiguous blame-avoiding fungibility to management. If a framework does not offer that, managers will politically subvert the policy-making process to rule out that framework. It’s the same reason why demonstrably value-additive, cost-effective prediction markets are rejected by managers despite evidence in their favor: it removes their ability to create ambiguous Dutch books out of different project deliverables and resort to exploiting subjective psychological biases of superiors to win money & status increases. Anything that holds them accountable to the actual measured result status of a deliverable can’t be tolerated. Scrum is just the by-product of corporate status-seeking evolutionary war games against in-house scientific thinking.
• mempko 7y ago
  To think of scrum as a process is wrong. It's actually an organizational pattern language. The idea is that social interactions are a complex system and there are patterns of interactions which, from experience, seem to work in certain contexts. http://www.scrumabok.org/ http://www.scrumabok.org/ It's not even software specific. Which is actually a strength. Example, one common misconception is the daily standup is a status meeting. In fact you are supposed to replan in standup, it's a tiny planner. Not sure how you can call the ability to pivot every day not agile. EDIT: Unpopular option, software quality is poor and it has nothing to do with scrum.
  • patothon 7y ago
    No. Agile is a subset of TPS (toyota production system)/Lean applied to software.
    • mempko 7y ago
      And scrum? TPS is explicitly an influence on scrum.
      • patothon 7y ago
        Scrum is just an instance of the agile manifesto. TPS/Lean > Agile > Scrum. Kanban for example is another instance of the agile manifesto.
        • mempko 7y ago
          Scrum existed before the agile manifesto. It's probability more accurate to say Agile is a mix of those things.
    • iaml 7y ago
      Actually, lean is lean applied to software. Agile is Henry Ford's interpretation of lean applied to his factories, applied to software.
  • geofft 7y ago
• RandyRanderson 7y ago
  A long time ago, ppl figured out that no one process was right for every organization, project, technology, etc. They created process frameworks (things used to create a process) and they saw that they were good. Then ppl came along and said that they were "too complicated" we need something Agile! In actual fact, those ppl didn't understand the process frameworks and just created a specific instance of one and they wondered why it didn't work for all projects, organizations, technologies, etc. And then they said those processes are "too simple" - what can we do? "Maybe we should create a way of generating a process?", they then said. And so it went... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solutions_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solutions_Framework
• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  Agile itself is pretty bad too. “Responding to change over sticking to the plan” is pretty much the single biggest reason why I see projects fail.
  • jrochkind1 7y ago
    I think the key motivation of agile is the recognition that the plan made in advance is often not right. If completing "the plan" is seen as success, then of course sticking to the plan is the best way to success. But if maximizing business/user value is the success, then "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." (I don't like "the enemy" concept, but this is a famous quote that gets across the concept). And I think the reason why "agile" fails is because many actors in many organizations find they are effectively rewarded for "completing the plan" regardless of business/user value, indeed.
    • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      This is just not accurate. The types of changes thrown in after early requirements gathering are most often coming from product managers and executives, not from customers and not driven by genuine feedback or budget constraints, etc. “Sticking to the plan” does not mean rigidly enforcing zero changes, but rather means keeping a commitment to the general scope and direction that was mapped out. Compromises should require extraordinary hard evidence before being accepted. This is really why Agile as a general set of guidelines is so easy to subvert and ends up being a misused tool in most every situation where Agile is deployed (Scrum of otherwise). Project management guidelines need to start out by specifying a way that quality is strictly disallowed from being subverted by competing interests that lobby for changing the plan. If a set of software project management guidelines doesn’t start out with an unchallengeable quality-above-all-else mandate that creates policy barriers to the natural entropy of different interests trying to lobby for why their preferred change has to be made, then it’s doomed to just get politically subverted. Doesn’t matter if it’s Agile, Waterfall, extreme programming, whatever. “Sticking to the plan” in the sense of setting up preemptive, high-cost barriers to anti-quality modifications to what was agreed is _the_ thing.
  • 7y ago
• forgotmypw 7y ago
  I've worked on more than 10 different Scrum teams, and have seen it done well exactly once. When it was good, it was very good. But we spent one entire workday (7 hours) on each sprint follow-up meeting, and then another entire workday planning the next sprint. That is what it took to write the stories, break them down into one-point pieces, prioritize with the PO, pass the stories out to the devs, etc. Most places just don't plan for enough time to do things right, and quality is second priority, so no matter what methodology you use, you lose, because no cared about doing it right to begin with.
  • gchucky 7y ago
    I'm on a team that started doing Scrum a few months ago, and we're still figuring it out. To be clear: are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so because they spent more time on the process? Reading what you wrote, spending two full days every two weeks to plan sounds, well, terribly dragged out. Does it feel like the time was well spent, or was it a slog?
    • jpollock 7y ago
      I had a similar experience, where we would spend at a full day every sprint planning the sprint (team of 5). During the project, it felt like a bit of a waste. We were spending a full 10% of our time on project management. However, looking back, I see that a) it seems to match up with other's experience, and b) it's pretty much the same amount of overhead for project management that the project would have had using any methodology. At least with the 1-2 days every 2 weeks everyone sees it and it's something you can get better at. I'll take that over magical GANTT charts any day.
    • forgotmypw 7y ago
      It did not seem dragged out, it was just thorough, and reasonably un-rushed. It was somewhat tiring, but definitely worth it. By the end of the planning meeting, we had a clear idea of what we were going to accomplish, and a reasonable amount of confidence that we considered all the tasks that went into our plan. Because when a story was, e.g. "add addresses to the clients page", it was broken down, discussed, thought out, and agreed upon. The moments when I discovered, oh shit, this story will actually take 10 hours longer than I had allocated, and now I have to stay until 10PM two days this week to meet my committment. Because our story points were approximately an hour each, and almost every story was broken down until there were no tasks more than 3 points each, 1 or 2 preferred. It was all thanks to our scrum-master/project manager, who had actually spent a lot of time learning about scrum/agile/kanban/etc, read many books on it, and most of all, was committed to doing it right. I think our sprints were a bit longer than 2 weeks.
• hestefisk 7y ago
  “To me it seems that one very important part of high quality software development is to maintain a simple priority queue of tasks. The weight is a combination of the value a task provides for the customer / developers and the estimated effort to implement this task.” A.k.a. common sense :)
• tmin 7y ago
  In my current team, we post our daily status on a slack channel: what we do yesterday and we are going to do today. We try to keep to one or two points. We have remote people so that works out well. Standup is optional. On Monday meetings, each person tell one thing that we are going to do. Sometimes it is two things but the point is to focus.
  • gremlinsinc 7y ago
    This is the way it should be. Meetings should only be between business / leads to get scope onto canvas. If I'm blocked I'll seek out the person who can most help me. I can easily find 5-10 minutes to write out a summary, but on my terms when I'm not in coding mode. Now, I'm freelancing, likely to be team lead for the company assuming they get financing - and I keep taking notes and reading ways to organize better. We have a ton of work to do, it's a financial mobile app that has 0 tests on the api (I'm single-handedly running the API development Laravel + vue (for some web views)). Money is tight so I'm the only dev on web side and we have 1 ios dev. The hope is to be full-time at this by Christmas w/ a 6 figure salary (my first +6 figures).
• ravenstine 7y ago
  Has anyone ever tested whether Scrum or Agile actually work better than "Waterfall" for software development?
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    I dunno, by now I would actually be really happy with a waterfall requirements document.
  • sidlls 7y ago
    Waterfall was terrible in many ways but it seems to me for all the problems with that methodology that "agile" has fixed it has created at least one new one, and often more.
  • ddebernardy 7y ago
    Agile works fine, if you ignore the Scrum hocus pocus. Stick to basic project management principles (work on one project at the time, wrap things up before moving on to the next project, set aside a bit of time for unrelated work) with the stakeholder put at the center of what you're up to. The problem with Scrum is that it's usually (always?) implemented as serialized waterfall projects with completely arbitrary looking deadlines (i.e. the sprint's length). All too often things get sort of done but not done quite as well as everybody would be happy with. It's stressful for everyone involved and, insofar as I've seen it used, it makes accumulating technical debt even more likely than more traditional waterfall projects.
• jpollock 7y ago
  Whenever I've used scrum, the developers set the estimate and task breakdowns. We even had the developer _doing_ the work provide the estimate. It's not really fair to have someone else estimate your work, it doesn't breed commitment either. We did sanity check things - sometimes an estimate would seem big and everyone else would ask why. The answer was either we had missed something (typically), or (rarely) the estimator misunderstood the task and thought it was something bigger. At the end of each sprint/cycle we shared estimate vs actual effort, to improve our ability to make a good estimate and set an overall velocity. On my first Scrum/Agile project, there were complaints of overwork the first sprint. Then I pointed out that we were the ones setting our own estimates, setting the pace and causing our own problems. After that, the estimates got reasonable. We stopped playing "Name that Tune" with our estimates and the project settled down.
• Osiris 7y ago
  I'm doing Kanban right now at my job and, I have to tell you, it's so liberating. I hate artificial deadlines (i.e., sprints). Kanban let's you focus on the work without all the process distractions.
• ravenstine 7y ago
  Scrum truly does end up being "Waterfall" most of the time, in my experience. I think this is largely because teams or management inevitably get bored with projects and end up shifting priorities regardless. From what I've seen, projects almost always start out in a requirements/analysis phase because management, stakeholders, etc., need the reassurance. I've yet to see any public-facing project of meaningful size start out releasing actual MVPs as opposed to "big bang" releases. Design often happens first because engineers don't want to(and sometimes can't) begin coding away and then receive designs that are either counter to their existing work or are unworkable; management usually sides with design because, well, it looks cool. Engineers eventually get coding, but non-automated testing doesn't really occur until later because it can be impractical to have people testing unfinished software. Then there's alpha testing, users break the software, engineers fix bugs, A/B testing of different versions of features, then beta testing, where users again break the software and the engineers fix more bugs. The project continues to drag on because the first 80% of a project is always the easiest part, and management is always hesitant to release "unfinished" software. Inevitably, there's a big bang release, by which point management has already gotten bored and has dreamt up other "big ideas" for the team to focus on, at which point the project is, for all intents and purposes, placed into maintenance limbo where bugs are fixed, junior developers place their awful code, and a new "feature" is added now and then to satisfy the marketing department. Senior developers rationalize the waterfall-like nature of the project, so they opt for "continuous integration", but all that ends up translating to is maintenance limbo without versioning. The actual next version of the software doesn't get built until after most if not all the original team left, and the original software became "legacy" enough that bugs keep popping up and the new engineers don't want to touch the old code. Management eventually gives in, for better or worse. Am I wrong? This is what I've seen happen to the vast majority of software projects, all under companies that were either Scrum, Agile, or pretend "Agile". Maybe I've just had bad luck. I wish more teams could pick and choose what methodologies to use for their purposes, rather than buy into MLM garbage.
• rileymat2 7y ago
  I am curious how much process research is being done as an industry. With billions at stake, it seems like I would run across more studies where teams were paid to produce the same software independently. But virtually none of the methodologies I read are backed by much rigorous experimentation. Maybe it exists and I am just not reading the correct articles.
  • mdorazio 7y ago
    You're 100% right that this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be tested in various settings to figure out what an optimal setup looks like for different problems. Unfortunately, I had a hell of a time finding actual comparative data with real metrics [1][2]. Pretty sad that 90% of the "research" available is either snake oil or mostly useless comparisons of methodology. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85d0/00404206914501d26e0bb46f079832ef0ce2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85d0/00404206914501d26e0bb4... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261047173_Agile_and_Wellbeing_--_Stress_Empowerment_and_Performance_in_Scrum_and_Kanban_Teams https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261047173_Agile_and...
• oisjdfoiwej 7y ago
  Where this stuff really fails (IMO) is when execs throw together a half-baked structure around a project, and throw minimally qualified human resources and a few consultancy firms at it. Knowing that "shit rolls downhill", it's always the developers who end up sweeping up the mess working endless hours trying to make deadlines, ensuring everyone further up the hill looks good to their bosses, while praying that their project doesn't get terminated. In my experience this seems to be an issue unique to enormous corporations. When I used to work at small / medium-sized companies this never happened.
• ScottBurson 7y ago
  Managers, not understanding the difference between latency (how long each task takes) and throughput (how much work is getting done in total), always try to optimize for latency. The predictable result: throughput goes to hell, and then latency goes with it. People who actually write software understand that you have to optimize for throughput first. Not to worry: latency won't be forgotten! But a primary focus on throughput will result in a clean codebase, that will maximize throughput and minimize latency.
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    The rationale is that if you minimize latency, throughput has to be maximum too, so optimizing latency is enough. In practice latency is the goto target for optimizing actual processes. It's the most linked with all the risks. But software development is not an actual process.
    • ScottBurson 7y ago
      > The rationale is that if you minimize latency, throughput has to be maximum too Exactly. And it's quite wrong even without taking the growth of complexity into account — as every engineer knows, or should know. Getting every task done as quickly as possible requires a lot of context switching, which is murder on throughput. When you add in the effects of complexity growth (aka technical debt, though I think "complexity growth" is clearer) the disadvantages of optimizing for latency become that much more serious. And the worst part is, as the disease progresses and latency deteriorates, managers try to cure it by applying even larger doses of the poison. This idea that managers optimize for latency, while I optimize for throughput, occurred to me only recently. But as I look back over the disagreements I've had with managers through the years (including disagreements over the usefulness of Scrum processes!), it's quite remarkable how many of them seem to come down to this.
      • ako 7y ago
        There's pretty good theory behind the idea of minimizing latency to improve throughput. One of the better books on this is "Managing the Design Factory", and a followup called "The principles of product development flow". These books are not about software development, but of product development in general. The first one actually predates agile, published in 1997. Core idea is that minimizing the size of the tasks is the best way to improve productivity. Not getting it done as quickly as possible, but to decrease the size. Remember that product development (new, innovative, uncertainties) vs product manufacting (repeatable), is not a new problem, and not unique to the software industry. There's a lot to learn from product development in other industries. Another interesting read is "The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process And Technology" which talks about ways of making product development predictive, and less risky. It's interesting to see how little software is used to improve the process of software development. Other industries use a lot of software (cad/cam, visual modelling, testing, impact analysis) to improve efficiency and quality of product development. Software for product development is a huge market.
• femto113 7y ago
  There's a set of practices here in Seattle that I've come to call Skragile, which evinces the veneer of of Scrum, Kanban, and Agile, but embraces very little of the fundamental philosophies. The most distinctive characteristics: - daily standups (often one per day per team so multiple per person) - sprint based development cycles, often with retrospectives - fondness for the "as an X I want to Y" story - story points defined in terms of developer hours or days - Kanban style "pick a thing to work on", even in sprints - burndown charts Seems nearly inevitable that when anyone here says "we need more process" they're looking to have more of one or more of the above. I essentially never hear anyone in project management say anything like "we need to build more prototypes" or "we need to streamline our deployment process" or any of the other concepts that would actually characterize a (lower case a) agile development process. (edited for formatting)
  • zdragnar 7y ago
    This is pretty typical elsewhere too (midwest US as a data point). Its popular because managers can implement it. Agile- the manifesto version- was intended as a way to re-introduce the notion of discipline that newer generations of programmers had lost (where previously they were engineers and scientists who wrote code, now people who code exclusively eithout other backgrounds). It feels like we have come full circle to where the new generations of programmers have delegated (or lost) all discipline to managers' Scrum plannings. Managers and "product owners" aren't engineers or programmers. They shouldn't be expected to "manage" a developer's day-to-day, and yet them presiding over sit-down-stand-up meetings and demanding points and determining deadlines and features is precisely what it has come to. We are right back where we were when the manifesto was drafted.
    • spamizbad 7y ago
      The irony is, when I first saw Agile/Scrum, I thought of it mostly as a tool to provide discipline further up the chain rather than down. User stories? Oh, a neat way to keep requirements general and open-ended so we can properly address how we're actually going to solve a user's problem. Surely it'll prevent PMs from over-specifying requirements that lose sense of true objectives. 2 week Sprints? Cool, estimates are hard, and now I never have to estimate more than 10 business days worth of labor. Retrospectives? Great idea, we can finally do proper post-mortems and knowledge-sharing! Scrum Masters? Wonderful, there's someone whose dedicated to running the process and making sure we have everything we need! What I wasn't anticipating: User Stories? But what about critical requirements that need to be prioritized that don't fit into "As an X I need Y" 2 Week Sprints? I now have so much technical debt a repo man is confiscating my laptop. Retrospectives? This is always going to be 100% about how we didn't estimate correctly and not about far more important matters like: how these features didn't help our users, technical knowledge-sharing, and ticking-out technical debt. Scrum Masters? Oh, you mean Project Managers?
• stevage 7y ago
  The position may be right, but it's so badly argued. Arguments he uses in support: - the dictionary definition of "agile" - how many times the word "agile" appears in the Scrum Guide - how "lengthy" the Scrum Guide "seems" - that Scrum is a process, so does not "sound Agile". Ugh. How did this reach #1 on HN?
  • annogram 7y ago
    At least the discussion in the comments is better argued.
  • akeck 7y ago
    I think because people are frustrated. My read of the conversation is that there's a lot of latent resentment towards modern Agile and Scrum practices.
• smrtinsert 7y ago
  Said it a million times before - I deal with way more process and paperwork using scrum than I ever did with waterfall. I'm not saying waterfall was an answer, but at the places I worked on it, it did a better job of staying out of my way.
• martin_drapeau 7y ago
  The author had really bad experiences. SCRUM is super agile when done right. Change can be introduced during sprint transitions (reviews, retrospectives and planning) - never in the middle of a sprint. Doing so will kill moral and break the rhythm of the dev team. SCRUM is meant to be owned by the developers - not management. Shame on companies that hijack and impose such process. SCRUM gives dev teams rhythm with sprints. Allows them to deliver mini releases of functional software in 2-week increments (could be 1 to 4 weeks too - lenght should be decided during planning). The goal of a sprint is to be decided by the developer and doesn't have to be about the software. Can be about learning, improving as a team or helping team members to grow. Here are a few examples I've seen: - Measure 5 metrics in Kibana - Marie-Pier leads sprint review demo - Try self-merging PR's and measure the results - No more loose ends Of course, in parallel the team builds and delivers an increment of functional software. The planning, review and retro rituals are paramount. SCRUM can only work well if those are well planned and executed. The retrospective is particularly important to allow the team to improve themselves. Its an opportunity to change their own process (i.e. change the definition of done). Contrary to wide belief, story points are not part of SCRUM. Its a mechanism that can be used to gauge the size of work - it should be up to the dev team to decide whether to use them or not. Again dev teams should own that process - should not be imposed by management. These lessons I've learned in the past two years thanks to an awesome SCRUM evangelist we've hired. I'm proud to say its changed our lives for the better.
• deleted 7y ago
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• AngeloAnolin 7y ago
  There have been a lot of software development methodology but one thing that's been overlooked a lot is the competence of the people doing the execution of the project. I am talking not just about the developers / engineers who are building the product but everyone across the pipeline - product owners, business stakeholders, process specialists, business analysts, project managers and just about everyone else. People attribute failure to the process because it is demeaning to put the blame on people when established best practices can receive the finger pointing. Stop the notion of being nice to the lack of skills of people. Hiding behind being nice does not resolve the issue but rather propagates it. Fix the issue by providing the grounds for people to learn and become productive.
  • mempko 7y ago
    Yes! One thing I don't see people mention is that Scrum requires that everyone on a team to be competent. It's for teams that are already great that want to be even greater. It's not for teams with inexperience and incompetence. My guess is many people are afraid of scrum because it may out them as incompetent.
    • perl4ever 7y ago
      I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but "many people are afraid of scrum because it may out them as incompetent" sounds like the cliche of "X cannot fail, it can only be failed"
      • mempko 7y ago
        Yes, it does sound like a cliche. However, the point of scrum is to find problems that get in the way. Through the process, it's clear who knows what they are doing and who doesn't.
  • crispyambulance 7y ago
    > Stop the notion of being nice to the lack of skills of people. Projects don't fail because people are "too nice". Projects staffed with fully qualified people with hardcore skills fail too. And projects staffed with utterly under-qualified people sometimes do just fine. The thing is projects succeed or fail for many different reasons, usually multiple reasons operating in concert. I think the best approach is not to be dogmatic about process and to recognize that "pointing fingers" rarely resolves anything, regardless of whether one is pointing at the process or the people.
• diminoten 7y ago
  This is very light on specifics? What, exactly, is fragile about Scrum? Where does it break down, and what can I do to prevent it from breaking down? Without that info, this just feels like buzzword bingo, a la "What should I write about to stir the pot today?"
• jnwatson 7y ago
  Reading all the comments out there, there is some atrocious stuff people call Scrum. I'm not even a huge Scrum fan, but it folks seem to criticize what people do in the name of Scrum instead of what is actually in the process. The TLDR of Scrum is simple: (product) management gets to set the priority of things every 2 or 3 weeks. After that, we see what got done and check to see if the priorities are still the same. If the priorities are wrong, don't blame Scrum, blame management. If tech debt is increasing, don't blame Scrum, blame management. There's no magic bullet to determine what is important, and certainly Scrum Master training won't help an incompetent manager a competent one.
  • foopod 7y ago
    I don't think I have ever seen it done as badly as some of these comments. Scrum itself is a very light and quite flexible framework, half of the complaints here aren't even Scrum related. User stories aren't part of Scrum, neither are story points or burndown charts. Of all the people complaining about Scrum it doesn't sound like any of them have read the Scrum Guide. Symptoms of Scrum are not managers pressuring people at stand ups, squeezing 4 weeks of work into 2 and having a "team" of 20 people. These are symptoms of poor leadership.
• innomatics 7y ago
  I agree that Scrum is fragile but not that it isn't agile. It's agile up to the point that it is broken, which happens often due to it's fragility. That it is easily broken is an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of its complexity, and common misunderstandings/misuses. Scrum is complex because large software projects (large as in number of people, budget and expected velocity) are never simple to manage. Scrum is complex because correct usage can not be read from a book nor gained from a qualification - it requires experienced judgement to pick the optimal usage and apply it to a team and project. Nothing can beat the effectiveness and efficiency of a single strong developer working on a stream of well considered backlog items. That is engineer nirvana! However many projects simply require more velocity than one person can manage. From here, there is a whole spectrum of processes that should be chosen depending on resources and needs. From my experience, full scrum kicks in once you have four or five engineers on the same system. Product management is a key point of failure in Scrum, true also with other processes. But it's felt so much more when an entire team grinds to a halt and an iteration fails. If Scrum doesn't feel agile then you are doing something wrong. This is exactly the question the team should be asking itself at retrospectives (doesn't need to be three questions!). What's changing in your process sprint to sprint? Scrum masters are there to facilitate incremental process changes driven by team members, not a system that doesn't result in agile software delivery.
• thunderbong 7y ago
  From all the comments, I see that arguments are there both ways. I also understand that we should follow a process that bets suits the business. I would really like to know how we could set up an Agile process provided that is what is required. Is there anywhere this would be documented to explain - a. How an agile process in initiated? b. How an agile process is maintained? I have been part of a team with mis-applied agile processes - 1. Requirements change frequently. And not due to users asking for them. More like the Project Managers asking for more configurablity. 2. Requirements are not thought through. Even the simplest cases. 3. Changes don't get vetted by users. Instead, we go through another round of requirements! 4. Every once in a while requirements (and teams) get re-organized, re-planned which puts all the developers off. I have also been part of a team which focussed on deliveries. This team has been able to write tests and iterate over requirements fast. The satisfaction level of all the developers in the team as well as the project owners were high. 1. Requirements were phased. 2. Whatever was required to be done in each phase was thought through as far as possible. Anything that wasn't clear or was more complex to think out was sent back to the project owners / users for clarity. 3. Code and tests get written. Phase delivered. Although this process was extremely successful, I don't know if I would call this Agile.
• mtaksrud 7y ago
  Although I have remained sceptical of Scrum, I do find it a bit strange that many of the negative comments about Scum here seems to be related to not doing Scrum (The old, you are not doing Scrum properly). All the talk about managers, and being told what to do in a sprint etc. None of that sounds like Scrum to me. Isn’t the whole idea of Scrum about self organising teams (?), independent of management etc. All you have is a Scrum Master to facilitate the process, and a Product Owner (part of the team) who prioritises the backlog because that role has an understanding of what is needed to solve the problem at hand (in terms of functionality needed).
• hliyan 7y ago
  I searched the entirety of the Scrum Guide (https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html) and could not find a single reference to "agile". And a quick Google search about the origins of Scrum reveals: In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods; while Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, referring to it using the single word Scrum.
• a-dub 7y ago
  "ahh-gee-lay! must be italian!"
• deleted 7y ago
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• hendershot 7y ago
  The problem often is that scrum (or any iterative process) fails when it's not paired with good XP engineering practices. There's constant learning and change on the product side, which drives constant learning and change on the implementation side, the code needs to be constantly refactored to best handle the changes. TDD/yagni/refactoring allows you to keep your code base nimble. I can't imagine doing an iterative process by slamming features in one after another without refactoring the code as you go to handle what "you now know", or not having good test coverage to support the changes you need to make. Refactoring also shouldn't be something the PO is aware of, it's not a story, or a 2 month break from feature development. It's part of the job as each story is implemented. Yes, sometimes you don't notice a good way of doing something until some time passes and that area of the code becomes a bigger refactor than usual, just have to deal with it as soon as possible.
• taeric 7y ago
  Reading the comments on this post are truly sad. The amount of "me too" juxtaposed with "actually, this isn't a true scotsman" are truly mind boggling. I wish there was a prescriptive way to successfully make and deliver software. I have seen very little evidence that there is.
• bitwize 7y ago
  The aim of Scrum, and other methodologies tagged Agile, is -- near as I can tell -- to emulate a good programmer with a team of mediocre programmers. Not that all developers working on Agile teams are mediocre programmers, only that the business wants to achieve good-programmer results while still being able to leverage the wider talent pool and lower risk and cost offered by hiring mediocre programmers, so it tends to adopt formalized processes designed to work well with them in the hopes that following the process will make them achieve good results. The process is a formalization of the relationship a good programmer has with their client, which is known to produce good results; therefore, the process must also produce good results by definition (and any failure to produce good results can immediately be blamed on lack of adherence to the process). Unfortunately there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and when you emulate you necessarily incur overhead, which can be prohibitively large if you're emulating something powerful -- plus, if you have actual good programmers on your team, they will either quit or start emulating mediocre programmers to remain compatible with your mediocre-programmer process. Either way, you lose the benefits of having them.
• jeandejean 7y ago
  That's a bit of an easy critic of Scrum on its literal sense rather than a critic on what doesn't work or isn't agile or is fragile. I've seen Scrum badly and imperfectly implemented everywhere I've been, yet I think this is preferable as having a strict interpretation of its principles and processes. I don't care actually if Scrum is intrinsically not agile (or Agile): I think what matters and is actually what's happening is people adopting Scrum with agility. It has good principles like backlog, sprint and daily meeting. If teams only pick one of those or anything else and that it help them, great! By the way holding solely Scrum accountable for failures is narrowing down the analysis to only one part of all things that can go wrong and have nothing to do with Scrum. That's a cognitive biases concentrate.
• myspy 7y ago
  Scrums point for me is to prepare your development time. Talk about the issues, prepare the issues, ask the client, make a mock-up and then implement in code. Usually it's hack together something and see if it sticks, which is awful.
• edsykes 7y ago
  just to offset a bit about scrum being bad: I have used SCRUM over 15 years to run teams and it worked. Most of the problems I am hearing on here are culture problems and no process can fix that. Regarding planning, a day per scrum is normal - sometimes longer, you have to use your judgement to determine when to move from design to implementation. Also, heavy use of spiking stories to learn enough to create the right design is important
  • sime2009 7y ago
    Can you explain a little bit more about your "spiking stories" and how you use them?
• lugg 7y ago
  Reminds me of this goto conference talk from one of the original Agile developers "pragmatic" Dave Thomas. Speaks a lot bout what agile truly is and how scrum is a very large mismatch. https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M
• yibg 7y ago
  The best place I've worked at as a developer essentially had no process. It's also the place I really saw the benefits of having good managers (or a project manager, but here the manager took this role). Essentially the "process" was: - Someone gets an idea to do something, e.g. PMs wants to add a feature. - The manager (maybe with the help of a dev) figures out which teams need to be involved (e.g. dependencies). - Get a very rough estimate from developer. Are we talking a few days, a few weeks or a few months? - Manager, PM and other teams get together to figure out priorities, schedules and who's likely to be working on it. - Based on some discussions, areas of expertise etc, some number of devs gets assigned to work on this feature. From here the devs know what they're trying to accomplish, what the constraints are and who to go to for questions (PM, design etc). They also know who else from other teams they're collaborating with and they just figure out amongst themselves how to get things done. They'll keep their managers and the PM updated on progress and any blockers. Every once in a while manager etc have to step in. For example if some big that was previous unknown came up, there is a big risk, priorities need to be adjusted etc. But for the most part things just worked really smoothly. Sometimes we need to give estimates and really hit it (legal or security issues, big marketing launch etc), but for the most part we were trusted to be doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible. So none of the commits, sprints and burn down charts BS. It's not hard to gauge develop's productivity based on output anyways. If there was something slowing the team down, we communicated the need to the manager and PM, and we worked on fixing it. So for me, if you have good competent people that communicate well, you don't really need much process.
  • MIKarlsen 7y ago
    I think the challenge with having no process is this: You have to rely on great chemistry and raw talent. Look at Spotifys videos on their process. Every team is self-driving, because everyone knows how to do stuff. If you work at a company where there is no process, and not every is able to complete the whole task from A-Z, you end up with deadends and people who get stuck. If the culture doesn't encourage knowledgesharing, people end up making crappy solutions.
  • jsiepkes 7y ago
    I think the above can simply be summarised as "real managing and communication". As opposed to trying to create a couple of metrics because you don't really understand what people around you are doing.
• acd 7y ago
  I think that longer term strategic planning is missing from the Agile Scrum manifesto. Agree with the Software development priority queue part being good thing. Long term planning was in the waterfall process which does not work that great either since it tends to over focus on planning. How do you find a good balance between Agile and Waterfall? I think it can also be different what process works well if you are a startup and need to deliver a MVP minimum viable product as soon as possible. Compared a bit to if you are a long term enterprise company and need to maintain your code base over time. Ie dealing with technical debt from short term solutions vs long term stable.
  • jon-wood 7y ago
    Strategic planning doesn’t belong in a process designed to provide constant iteration on a two week basis. In successful organisations I’ve worked with strategic planning is one of the things that feeds into the backlog of features to be developed, and runs in parallel to development.
• sgt101 7y ago
  Scrum is a communication contract between customers / stakeholders, managers and dev teams. It is a poor cure for social and managerial dysfunction, but it is a cure. Scrum is a problem when it is mandated and imposed on functional organisations that do better and more fluid communication. This is often done as a way of flexing corporate power and does huge damage. A key problem is that we do not have ways of auditing and measuring the performance of software teams no matter what methods they are using - until then this is all anecdote.
  • arsenico 7y ago
    > A key problem is that we do not have ways of auditing and measuring the performance of software teams no matter what methods they are using - until then this is all anecdote. Of course we have ways of doing that - one is the code quality, another one is historical performance on agility.
• Pulletwee12549 7y ago
  In my experience, I was lucky to apply Scrum and Agile correctly so now I understand them and can distinguish between them. In my current job, there are no chances to replicate those conditions and I do not expect Scrum to succeed (although we use a lot of Scrum terms to define what we do). I think one should have experienced a successful scrum project before being able to criticise it. Scrum is a tool: you may be Agile without using Scrum or you may find easier to be Agile using Scrum. Doing Scrum does not make you Agile. Scrum is hard and implementing it takes different skills than those proven by individuals who can write code.
• danpalmer 7y ago
  Agile – the only word in the English language that inverses its meaning when capitalised.
• sadness2 7y ago
  The best of agile can be summed up in one piece of advice: "Create short feedback loops". Nail that and you can't go too far wrong.
• cuillevel3 7y ago
  The SCRUM guide is not long, it's 19 pages in a large font. If I remember correctly it does not even mention a lot of the processes which make up SCRUM for many teams. However the article is not wrong, it's too easy to make SCRUM all about the process, without changing anything about interactions, developer empowerment and feedback cycles. I think the SCRUM doesn't do a good job of putting limits on what is still agile SCRUM and what is not. Maybe because it's written in such a friendly language.
• known 7y ago
  Nothing can replace Will and Wisdom
• mcv 7y ago
  > "We are simply caught in a rat race and not able to make a short break in order to look at and learn from all the things that happened around us, maybe even before our time." But isn't that exactly what Scrum wants you to do? After every sprint, you spend some time to reflect, look at how you're working, look at the bigger picture, etc. Scrum is by no means perfect; it's a tool, not the infallible silver bullet the author wants it to be. If you misuse the tool, you're still going to get wrong results, but that's the same with every other method. The real question is: is there a better way to do it that can easily and reliably be implemented by large corporations? I think the popularity of Scrum is probably due to it being more successful than what was used before. It might not be truly Agile, but for large corporations, being truly Agile may be a bit much to ask. They need reliability and reproduceability, and that means they're always going to need some focus on processes and procedures, and can't always rely on people who might leave or have something happen to them. Not that Scrum is always a good fit for those processes and procedures, but it does help make it appealing for large companies, and at least it puts a good part of the process in the hands of the people who will be using it. tl;dr: Scrum is not perfect, but what is?
• yegor256a 7y ago
  You may find this very much relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOAMNOso46g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOAMNOso46g
• solatic 7y ago
  Scrum only works if you need sprints, and you only need sprints if you have non-engineering stakeholders whose mandatory approval can only be attained in one meeting per sprint length. Some large orgs really work like that, where the approval of one ham-fisted iron-gripped executive is deemed more important than hundreds of thousands of dollars of engineering talent going to waste. I don't think this is very effective but alright then. Everybody else should just be using Kanban boards with periodic review.
• wbronitsky 7y ago
  I’m quite amazed by the lack of substance in this article. It takes potshots at certain ideas and processes, without managing to explain these potshots, or even coherently explain the ideas and processes. It is a flimsy opinion piece with no substance, but a clickbait title so everyone ran here to comment. What a virtuous cycle
• devtul 7y ago
  I wonder what happened to so many developers that turned them so jaded and cynical towards scrum and project management. So far I've dealt with the good and bad of scrum with a good pinch of horrendous PMs in the mix, but I still came out of it with a positive view of the framework. It is hard to run it somewhat smooth and takes lots of motivated people to accomplish[1], but the result had a positive impact on my day-to-day work. 1 - Some people said that this can be a failing of scrum and I 100% agree.
• mmcnl 7y ago
  Honestly, the comments on this thread baffle me. Endless complaining about scrum and everyone who is not a developer is apparently clueless about software. Is this an adequate reflection of reality? This doesn't seem like a very mature attitude. Scrum is a simple framework with only three roles, the development team being one of them - so if the process fails you are (partly) to blame for it yourself as well. Take responsibility! What's the better alternative? What have you been doing to make things better? The answers to these questions as much more interesting than endless complaining.
• trickstra 7y ago
  > In other words, it is a very specific and well-defined process. This does not sound agile and it also does not sound Agile (remember: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”) This is a many times debunked myth about the Agile manifesto. Even the authors themselves explained that "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" does not mean and shouldn't be taken as "no processes". Also, agile is not about moving quickly but about being able to easily change direction any time, therefore dealing better with changing environment.