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The issue with Scrum is everything revolving around 2 week sprints. That doesn’t allow for much in terms of variability, longer term scheduling, or planning dep

The issue with Scrum is everything revolving around 2 week sprints. That doesn’t allow for much in terms of variability, longer term scheduling, or planning dependencies across multiple teams. Plus, in order to try to make the commitment/forecast accurate you have to invest a hefty amount of planning time every 2 weeks. The Scaled Agile (SAFe) approach is dramatically better here. You plan 8-12 weeks at a time across all teams and invest heavily in planning for 2-3 days of that entire time period. The planning time is synced up for all dev teams so they can communicate and work out cross dependencies. The other perk here is that you’re goal is to commit to the 12 weeks and not every 2 weeks. That allows for more ups and downs and there’s a built in 1.5 week buffer at the end specifically to account for overrun. You end up with a clear picture of what’s coming in the next quarter or so without flavor of the week course changes outside of a significant emergency.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
To be honest when I saw the diagram for scaled agile https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ the first my BS meter went off big time :). It definitely doesn’t deserve the word “agile” in it. It feels more like the management pipe dream of the perfectly predictable machine for software development.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  Yup. And the OP did nothing to dissuade me from that. 12 weeks instead of 2 isn't actually helpful; the whole goal of the 2 week sprint was to find a balance between minimal amount of time needed to recognize 'we're going to take longer than anticipated', and actually being able to deliver something useful. Going to 12 just means that you won't recognize things are slipping until the quarter is up.
  - brightball 7y ago
    You still break things into 2 week iterations over the 8-12 weeks. You still check in on things, get feedback and determine if changes or pivoting is needed. Nothing stops that. What it does stop is all of the planning meetings crammed in every 2 week time period while also giving a forum for planning between all of your other teams. There’s no advantage of scrum that is denied with SAFe. It just gets rid of most of the problems that I’ve experienced with it in the last 10-15 years.
RoughedUpEdge 7y ago
Normally if you're doing SAfE at the Enterprise level, you're also doing Scrum at the team level. Scrum is preferred, but not required.
rumanator 7y ago
> The issue with Scrum is everything revolving around 2 week sprints. That doesn’t allow for much in terms of variability, longer term scheduling, or planning dependencies across multiple teams. That assertion is clearly false. Just because a Sprint is x weeks that does not mean that planning needs to focus exclusively on what you can do in x weeks. The x weeks is only relevant to establish a target for deliverables, but naturally those deliverables can and more often than not are indeed aligned with multi-sprint goals. Heck, even in the Agile buzzword universe there is the concept of epics and spikes. Agile does not mean the development process needs to be a 2 week circus where planners have the memory of a goldfish. It's a framework to get all stakeholders on the same page and establish operations to accommodate changes.
- brightball 7y ago
  Every real scrum environment I’ve been in or heard of in my career has turned into “sprint at a time” planning. Perhaps short sided management is at fault?
ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
I’ve been thinking what if we did six week cycles like back in grade school. Five weeks for dev work, 1 light week for sprint retro and sprint planning. I could sneak it in cus it’s a multiple of 2.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

To be honest when I saw the diagram for scaled agile https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ the first my BS meter went off big time :). It definitely doesn’t deserve the word “agile” in it. It feels more like the management pipe dream of the perfectly predictable machine for software development.

lostcolony 7y ago
Yup. And the OP did nothing to dissuade me from that. 12 weeks instead of 2 isn't actually helpful; the whole goal of the 2 week sprint was to find a balance between minimal amount of time needed to recognize 'we're going to take longer than anticipated', and actually being able to deliver something useful. Going to 12 just means that you won't recognize things are slipping until the quarter is up.
- brightball 7y ago
  You still break things into 2 week iterations over the 8-12 weeks. You still check in on things, get feedback and determine if changes or pivoting is needed. Nothing stops that. What it does stop is all of the planning meetings crammed in every 2 week time period while also giving a forum for planning between all of your other teams. There’s no advantage of scrum that is denied with SAFe. It just gets rid of most of the problems that I’ve experienced with it in the last 10-15 years.

RoughedUpEdge 7y ago

Normally if you're doing SAfE at the Enterprise level, you're also doing Scrum at the team level. Scrum is preferred, but not required.

rumanator 7y ago

> The issue with Scrum is everything revolving around 2 week sprints. That doesn’t allow for much in terms of variability, longer term scheduling, or planning dependencies across multiple teams. That assertion is clearly false. Just because a Sprint is x weeks that does not mean that planning needs to focus exclusively on what you can do in x weeks. The x weeks is only relevant to establish a target for deliverables, but naturally those deliverables can and more often than not are indeed aligned with multi-sprint goals. Heck, even in the Agile buzzword universe there is the concept of epics and spikes. Agile does not mean the development process needs to be a 2 week circus where planners have the memory of a goldfish. It's a framework to get all stakeholders on the same page and establish operations to accommodate changes.

brightball 7y ago
Every real scrum environment I’ve been in or heard of in my career has turned into “sprint at a time” planning. Perhaps short sided management is at fault?

ulisesrmzroche 7y ago

I’ve been thinking what if we did six week cycles like back in grade school. Five weeks for dev work, 1 light week for sprint retro and sprint planning. I could sneak it in cus it’s a multiple of 2.