6 ms·

Scrum in of itself is not so much a deal, if it just provides a light framework/training wheels for companies transitioning to Agile. Start with 15 minute daily

by danjac 5y ago

Scrum in of itself is not so much a deal, if it just provides a light framework/training wheels for companies transitioning to Agile. Start with 15 minute daily standups and 2 week sprints, for example, but if you work better with a twice-weekly standup and a 6 week sprint, fine. Where it becomes a problem is where it's used to enforce underlying pathologies like micromanagement. But if your shop has a micromanagement problem, you'll be miserable, Scrum or no Scrum.

mk89 5y ago
in my team we don't micromanage, however I agree that some scrum events can be adjusted a bit. For example the sprint reviews don't make much sense if you can deliver any time you want, and we do. It's probably just a way to wrap a bunch of work we did and show it to keep everyone on the same page about what's happening. Daily also don't make sense, because the team has several major tracks in parallel and I can't really contribute to what others are doing, unless I decide to put my work aside and/or overwork. Why this? My guess is that it's more convenient for a manager to have a more consistent view of what's happening. On the other hands there are team members that like to hear what's happening besides their own work, and such meetings give them that opportunity. The luck we have are the retrospective meetings: one of the most efficient ways to actually make actionable things. This meetung I would never cancel, because it has nothing to do with the sprint but with the teamwork, workload, etc. The issue with all "things" is the ability of people to be able to adapt it to the own workflow. It takes balls and experience.
cogman10 5y ago
The reason people are hating scrum isn't because the simple scrum statement is simple, it's because a whole industry has been formed around advocating "true scrum" with consultants that fly in and give big meetings about how you can turn scrum into a tool for micromanagement. Corporate suits eat that shit up. The value add of scrum, to them, is everything devs hate. They love the burn down charts, the timelines for features, the resource allocation, the ability to fly in and say "You are working on polish? WTH value add does that bring to the company? Dump it and do feature 123 instead!" And, unfortunately, corporate suits tend to pay the bills. I'm sure there are companies out there that don't fall into micromanagement shit, but I'm convinced it's an inevitability that any successful company will eventually turn into a feature factory hell hole.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Agree. Also tickets being units of work that you can assign "effort" points to and measure "velocity" with is the biggest load of shit I've ever come across. I'm surprised any developers buy it. I've been told "oh no effort is not time" me : "but you always says what's that in days?" "No but we don't measure velocity like that" Me internally "oh fuck right off"
  - stephenhuey 5y ago
    Scrum doesn’t have velocity and burn-down charts. Those are add-on Agile extras. Scrum is simple, but it’s so annoying how people make everything so complicated. When I start working on something, we may have an idea of how much effort it is, but often you dig into the code and find gnarly tangles, or the model has more gotchas than people realize and the person doing the work is the one person who has the entire model loaded into their head at the moment. Yes, a manager might need to verify people are actually working, but if the manager is capable it shouldn’t require burn-down charts which can be full of inaccuracies. It often takes actual thinking to get real work done and micromanagers hovering about do not help with producing thoughtful work. Scrum just says to get some help from friends when you need it, communicate about what could make your job better in the next few weeks, and are we breaking things down into bite-size pieces or do people have unrealistic expectations?
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    We just had a talk from our master about how points are not days. Every developer ignored him and treated it as days because that was the signal. Management just made it official. Jira Align is rolled out and points are days. The master just threw up his hands and took his promotion under great duress. Before that the master really tried to have meaningful retros. Now we type some things in a doc, everyone is silent, and the master has dropped any mention of follow up or takeaways. ...and this is a company with a good culture! I have done this dance at places where the culture was not good. As a person renowned in my circle for technical ability and productivity this was the only place where I couldn't get anything done and was removed from the account by the manager. Relief.
  - 5y ago
freeduck 5y ago
Scrum stems from lean not agile
sumtechguy 5y ago
Scrum is a tool. It even has a tool built in to take care of these things, the retro. If you have someone on the team who is counting every point and dogmatically sitting on every metric that should be brought up in the retro as 'something that is not going well'. These tools are a way for devs to say 'here is how I am going to break this up and you have a limited amount of time so pick what you want'. The metrics are to help you realize you are doing an anti pattern. But if you force everyone to be good at them they will hide what is wrong. One group I was in everything was a #1 priority. I had to sit the manager down in his office for a couple of hours and make him pick the priorities. It turns out he did not know what he really wanted, yet he wanted to micromanage everything. I had to show him that you have 4 devs and they can not work on 15 things at the same time 200% of the time. They have lives outside of work and you will get nothing done if they are jumping around at every whim you come up with. After that the team worked much better. I would at the start of each sprint make him pick what order he wants things in then the devs could come in and fix it up correctly. Team management is totally on the table of 'things to work on' in scrum yet many PM's seem to forget that. My new team has 3 15-30 min calls a day. I just joined this team so I am watching for now for a couple of sprints. But you can bet money on the fact I am bringing that up in a retro. You are distracting everyone at regular intervals and they can not get into anything because they are always prepping for your status meetings. You are leaving them basically 30% of their day to actually do anything related to the things you want status on. A good PM who 'gets it' is great. One who strictly follows the metrics... yeah
- jseban 5y ago
  > they can not work on 15 things at the same time 200% of the time. Haha this is funny because it's so true. And this is a person who is actually a supposed to be a professional at allocating resources ;)
- amalcon 5y ago
  Ah yes, that conversation. Here's the list of things on the road map. Which ones do you want to bump to next quarter/year in order to do this new priority? "None" is only an option if you can somehow retroactively hire another dev 90 days ago.
andrekandre 5y ago
> ...provides a light framework/training wheels... Start with 15 minute daily standups and 2 week sprints, for example, but if you work better with a twice-weekly standup and a 6 week sprint, fine. training wheels are the perfect word for it, because people and management get used to it, and now cant ride without them, so now you have entire orgs running in training wheels smh

by danjac 5y ago

mk89 5y ago

in my team we don't micromanage, however I agree that some scrum events can be adjusted a bit. For example the sprint reviews don't make much sense if you can deliver any time you want, and we do. It's probably just a way to wrap a bunch of work we did and show it to keep everyone on the same page about what's happening. Daily also don't make sense, because the team has several major tracks in parallel and I can't really contribute to what others are doing, unless I decide to put my work aside and/or overwork. Why this? My guess is that it's more convenient for a manager to have a more consistent view of what's happening. On the other hands there are team members that like to hear what's happening besides their own work, and such meetings give them that opportunity. The luck we have are the retrospective meetings: one of the most efficient ways to actually make actionable things. This meetung I would never cancel, because it has nothing to do with the sprint but with the teamwork, workload, etc. The issue with all "things" is the ability of people to be able to adapt it to the own workflow. It takes balls and experience.

cogman10 5y ago

The reason people are hating scrum isn't because the simple scrum statement is simple, it's because a whole industry has been formed around advocating "true scrum" with consultants that fly in and give big meetings about how you can turn scrum into a tool for micromanagement. Corporate suits eat that shit up. The value add of scrum, to them, is everything devs hate. They love the burn down charts, the timelines for features, the resource allocation, the ability to fly in and say "You are working on polish? WTH value add does that bring to the company? Dump it and do feature 123 instead!" And, unfortunately, corporate suits tend to pay the bills. I'm sure there are companies out there that don't fall into micromanagement shit, but I'm convinced it's an inevitability that any successful company will eventually turn into a feature factory hell hole.

bennysomething 5y ago
Agree. Also tickets being units of work that you can assign "effort" points to and measure "velocity" with is the biggest load of shit I've ever come across. I'm surprised any developers buy it. I've been told "oh no effort is not time" me : "but you always says what's that in days?" "No but we don't measure velocity like that" Me internally "oh fuck right off"
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  Scrum doesn’t have velocity and burn-down charts. Those are add-on Agile extras. Scrum is simple, but it’s so annoying how people make everything so complicated. When I start working on something, we may have an idea of how much effort it is, but often you dig into the code and find gnarly tangles, or the model has more gotchas than people realize and the person doing the work is the one person who has the entire model loaded into their head at the moment. Yes, a manager might need to verify people are actually working, but if the manager is capable it shouldn’t require burn-down charts which can be full of inaccuracies. It often takes actual thinking to get real work done and micromanagers hovering about do not help with producing thoughtful work. Scrum just says to get some help from friends when you need it, communicate about what could make your job better in the next few weeks, and are we breaking things down into bite-size pieces or do people have unrealistic expectations?
- datavirtue 5y ago
  We just had a talk from our master about how points are not days. Every developer ignored him and treated it as days because that was the signal. Management just made it official. Jira Align is rolled out and points are days. The master just threw up his hands and took his promotion under great duress. Before that the master really tried to have meaningful retros. Now we type some things in a doc, everyone is silent, and the master has dropped any mention of follow up or takeaways. ...and this is a company with a good culture! I have done this dance at places where the culture was not good. As a person renowned in my circle for technical ability and productivity this was the only place where I couldn't get anything done and was removed from the account by the manager. Relief.
- 5y ago

freeduck 5y ago

Scrum stems from lean not agile

sumtechguy 5y ago

Scrum is a tool. It even has a tool built in to take care of these things, the retro. If you have someone on the team who is counting every point and dogmatically sitting on every metric that should be brought up in the retro as 'something that is not going well'. These tools are a way for devs to say 'here is how I am going to break this up and you have a limited amount of time so pick what you want'. The metrics are to help you realize you are doing an anti pattern. But if you force everyone to be good at them they will hide what is wrong. One group I was in everything was a #1 priority. I had to sit the manager down in his office for a couple of hours and make him pick the priorities. It turns out he did not know what he really wanted, yet he wanted to micromanage everything. I had to show him that you have 4 devs and they can not work on 15 things at the same time 200% of the time. They have lives outside of work and you will get nothing done if they are jumping around at every whim you come up with. After that the team worked much better. I would at the start of each sprint make him pick what order he wants things in then the devs could come in and fix it up correctly. Team management is totally on the table of 'things to work on' in scrum yet many PM's seem to forget that. My new team has 3 15-30 min calls a day. I just joined this team so I am watching for now for a couple of sprints. But you can bet money on the fact I am bringing that up in a retro. You are distracting everyone at regular intervals and they can not get into anything because they are always prepping for your status meetings. You are leaving them basically 30% of their day to actually do anything related to the things you want status on. A good PM who 'gets it' is great. One who strictly follows the metrics... yeah

jseban 5y ago
> they can not work on 15 things at the same time 200% of the time. Haha this is funny because it's so true. And this is a person who is actually a supposed to be a professional at allocating resources ;)
amalcon 5y ago
Ah yes, that conversation. Here's the list of things on the road map. Which ones do you want to bump to next quarter/year in order to do this new priority? "None" is only an option if you can somehow retroactively hire another dev 90 days ago.

andrekandre 5y ago

> ...provides a light framework/training wheels... Start with 15 minute daily standups and 2 week sprints, for example, but if you work better with a twice-weekly standup and a 6 week sprint, fine. training wheels are the perfect word for it, because people and management get used to it, and now cant ride without them, so now you have entire orgs running in training wheels smh