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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

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.
- brazzy 7y ago
  > are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so because they spent more time on the process? Creating fine-grained, detailed user stories and making sure that everyone understand them and agrees on the prioritization is not time spent on "the process", it's requirements engineering.
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  I just read your comment again, and I want to add this to my other reply: I would say the top, most useful, make-or-break practice that I would say is most essential to Scrum succeeding is a combination of: * 1 point ≈ 1 hour of work and * no task above 3 points, try to only have 1-point tasks Coincidentally, this process is what took the longest in our planning meetings, because the coders sat down and planned out the tasks, kind of the way you would in an algorithms course. The payoff is that our estimates, after the first couple of sprints, were dead on, and there was very little "discovered work" mid-sprint. No midnight oil. And no corner-cutting.
nitely 7y ago
7 hours of meetings? did people show up the next few days for work?
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  Yeah. It was a bit tiring, but also fun. I think it helped that we all liked each other.
andrzejg 7y ago
I had the same experience. I worked in 2 different companies, in 4 different teams. And I can see the value of planning. In the first company we broke down our 2 weeks work into 3-5 hour long tasks. By doing that we had to know exactly what is the work needed and we discovered the work that we didn't think about at the very beginning. Plannings would take 1-2 days. It was exhausting but in my opinion worth it. In my current company we create 5-8 tasks for whole sprint and when someone takes it then they work on it for 2-3 days and discover more work to be done. At the end we usually don't make it on time. Even if we do, we spend about 40% of our time on bugs/improvements that we didn't think about. My personal view is lack of experienced scrum masters and developers who have never seen scrum working at least once xD Lack of management support who would push the process. My favourite: ("what?! you want to spend 2 days on planning?! I can implement it in that time!").

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.
brazzy 7y ago
> are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so because they spent more time on the process? Creating fine-grained, detailed user stories and making sure that everyone understand them and agrees on the prioritization is not time spent on "the process", it's requirements engineering.
forgotmypw 7y ago
I just read your comment again, and I want to add this to my other reply: I would say the top, most useful, make-or-break practice that I would say is most essential to Scrum succeeding is a combination of: * 1 point ≈ 1 hour of work and * no task above 3 points, try to only have 1-point tasks Coincidentally, this process is what took the longest in our planning meetings, because the coders sat down and planned out the tasks, kind of the way you would in an algorithms course. The payoff is that our estimates, after the first couple of sprints, were dead on, and there was very little "discovered work" mid-sprint. No midnight oil. And no corner-cutting.

nitely 7y ago

7 hours of meetings? did people show up the next few days for work?

forgotmypw 7y ago
Yeah. It was a bit tiring, but also fun. I think it helped that we all liked each other.

andrzejg 7y ago

I had the same experience. I worked in 2 different companies, in 4 different teams. And I can see the value of planning. In the first company we broke down our 2 weeks work into 3-5 hour long tasks. By doing that we had to know exactly what is the work needed and we discovered the work that we didn't think about at the very beginning. Plannings would take 1-2 days. It was exhausting but in my opinion worth it. In my current company we create 5-8 tasks for whole sprint and when someone takes it then they work on it for 2-3 days and discover more work to be done. At the end we usually don't make it on time. Even if we do, we spend about 40% of our time on bugs/improvements that we didn't think about. My personal view is lack of experienced scrum masters and developers who have never seen scrum working at least once xD Lack of management support who would push the process. My favourite: ("what?! you want to spend 2 days on planning?! I can implement it in that time!").