4 ms·

I suspect the prescriptivism and detail have one end goal and that is for someone that has no idea how software is done to follow the procedures. It also turns

I suspect the prescriptivism and detail have one end goal and that is for someone that has no idea how software is done to follow the procedures. It also turns the process into an "almost predictable process" for the higher-ups to see turned into a graph in some ppt. You also have to deal with people who needs to be told which shoe to put in first before they think the process is "confusing". Same reason for PMP, it's to turn the procedure into "paint by numbers". Of course it rarely works that easily. But of course you can't justify the multiple middle-managers and why can't the people at the bottom just "turn the wheel faster" without it so there's a bit of purpose in that.

mannykannot 5y ago
More cynically, this is the path to selling consulting and training services.
osigurdson 5y ago
The issue with all of this addition process, ceremony and meetings is work still needs to get done. Sadly the only time to do work is often outside of working hours since then, finally, the meetings and ceremony have ended.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  I don't think this is the case. A two week sprint should have about 100 minutes of standup, 1 hour of planning, 1 hour of refinement, half an hour of review and 1 hour retro, ish (I can't remember the exact timings). About 5 hours every 2 weeks. Saying that adds up to a full 2 weeks of work is just... pointless. So falsifiable.
  - osigurdson 5y ago
    I can only speak from personal experience (perhaps our Scrum consultant did it wrong). We have a large group and even running through the all of the demos (mostly slides really) from all of the teams at the end of a three week period took days. Added to this the retrospective, multiple planning sessions as well as all of the meetings that we used to have prior to doing this. In the end, it was just so obviously unworkable to everyone it had to be stopped. However, you are absolutely right, we were not in meetings 100% of the time - it just felt like it. Many people need good swaths of uninterrupted time (perhaps 1.5-2 hours minimum) in order to be productive. Rapid context switching between various meetings and development work can be expensive. It is unfortunate when this time can only be found outside of working hours. My suggestion is to start with no process and no regular meetings and carefully add process/meetings as required. If you need to talk with one or more people... call them right now (or arrange a meeting with a clear agenda - right now). All overhead should be carefully evaluated in terms of its actual ROI.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      I agree with all of that. To me Scrum is a reasonably minimal set of meetings that involve everyone who needs to be involved as little as possible to get the job done, but that won't be everyone's experience. Partly because Scrum is a methodology with a pretty specific use case; it's definitely not for everything.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> It also turns the process into an "almost predictable process" for the higher-ups to see turned into a graph in some ppt. This is not just a scrum problem. Any agile process eventually reports to a layer of management that doesn't think in agile terms, and wants their PERT charts or whatever. The impedance mismatch at that boundary is one of the biggest difficulties with implementing agile.

mannykannot 5y ago

More cynically, this is the path to selling consulting and training services.

osigurdson 5y ago

The issue with all of this addition process, ceremony and meetings is work still needs to get done. Sadly the only time to do work is often outside of working hours since then, finally, the meetings and ceremony have ended.

robertlagrant 5y ago
I don't think this is the case. A two week sprint should have about 100 minutes of standup, 1 hour of planning, 1 hour of refinement, half an hour of review and 1 hour retro, ish (I can't remember the exact timings). About 5 hours every 2 weeks. Saying that adds up to a full 2 weeks of work is just... pointless. So falsifiable.
- osigurdson 5y ago
  I can only speak from personal experience (perhaps our Scrum consultant did it wrong). We have a large group and even running through the all of the demos (mostly slides really) from all of the teams at the end of a three week period took days. Added to this the retrospective, multiple planning sessions as well as all of the meetings that we used to have prior to doing this. In the end, it was just so obviously unworkable to everyone it had to be stopped. However, you are absolutely right, we were not in meetings 100% of the time - it just felt like it. Many people need good swaths of uninterrupted time (perhaps 1.5-2 hours minimum) in order to be productive. Rapid context switching between various meetings and development work can be expensive. It is unfortunate when this time can only be found outside of working hours. My suggestion is to start with no process and no regular meetings and carefully add process/meetings as required. If you need to talk with one or more people... call them right now (or arrange a meeting with a clear agenda - right now). All overhead should be carefully evaluated in terms of its actual ROI.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    I agree with all of that. To me Scrum is a reasonably minimal set of meetings that involve everyone who needs to be involved as little as possible to get the job done, but that won't be everyone's experience. Partly because Scrum is a methodology with a pretty specific use case; it's definitely not for everything.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> It also turns the process into an "almost predictable process" for the higher-ups to see turned into a graph in some ppt. This is not just a scrum problem. Any agile process eventually reports to a layer of management that doesn't think in agile terms, and wants their PERT charts or whatever. The impedance mismatch at that boundary is one of the biggest difficulties with implementing agile.