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> Modern "scrum" gets in the way of just accomplishing business goals by pretending that they're perfectly predictable. Where did you get that idea? The Agile

> Modern "scrum" gets in the way of just accomplishing business goals by pretending that they're perfectly predictable. Where did you get that idea? The Agile Manifesto literally says: "Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage." Scrum is deliberately incremental precisely because it's designed to accommodate continuously changing business requirements that are NOT predictable.

ahelwer 5y ago
Nobody cares what the agile manifesto says. The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. Of course, no developer actually makes uniform incremental daily progress so this really just turns into a demoralizing exercise in lying about what you did the previous day, punctuated by underselling the days where you actually got quite a bit done. Then you tune out as everyone else goes in their turn giving updates on something that doesn't affect what you're doing in any way whatsoever. The best weeks are when the manager goes on vacation so you don't have to put up with the daily bullshit. Also, every manager swears their scrum isn't like this. And every one of them is wrong.
- worik 5y ago
  > so this really just turns into a demoralizing exercise in lying about what you did the previous day What depressing places you worked. I have worked once at a firm that had a daily meeting of developers. It was very useful, no expectations, we kept each other informed. Why would you lie to your comrades? I can guess answers to that....
  - ahelwer 5y ago
    See how many days in a row you can say "I didn't make progress yesterday" to your manager before it becomes an issue. Myself and all the best developers I know have days or weeks of doing very little punctuated by days or weeks of doing quite a lot. Of course, I don't lie to my comrades - as intimated by the quip about weeks where the manager leaves, we were very truthful with one another if we actually bothered having a daily scrum. Go ahead and posture online about how you would never overstate your accomplishments to your manager I guess.
    - alistairSH 5y ago
      As a manager or co-worker, if you reported "no progress" a few days in a row, I'd ask why not. I would honestly be looking for ways to help you make progress because getting stuck in a rut sucks (and we've all been there). I don't care if some widget in Jira gets moved today or next Monday (but you're making progress to completing that feature/fix/whatever). I do care if you're literally making no progress.
      - ahelwer 5y ago
        And such help would not be useful, because these are problems of motivation. So to avoid such unhelpful help (which can often exacerbate issues - such are the mysteries of the self) I tell you everything is fine. Tally up my work at the end of the month and you'll be happy.
        selfhoster11 5y ago
        If anything, questions like this would start piling on anxiety and pressure.
      - qqtt 5y ago
        Another angle is that in software development, it's pretty common to have days where there isn't much material progress but things are getting better understood by the developer themselves. Senior engineers in my experience are quite comfortable doing several days or even weeks of scoping, investigating, prototyping, and general maneuvering before coming to a solution that ends up taking a day or less. The constant need to interject with help when "no progress" flags are thrown gets into the realm of micromanagement, and that is doubly so when every day or even hour of "no progress" gets treated as a crisis that needs to be solved ASAP. Scrum fosters an environment of "no breathing room" for these frequent and common stretches of "no progress".
        alistairSH 5y ago
        But scoping, investigating, prototyping, etc are all forms of progress. Tell me that's what you're doing. In my experience, "I got nothing done" is a giant red flag that the developer is actually stuck on something and not in a "I need a day or two to figure this out" way (because the developer would have said as much if that was the case).
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > Nobody cares what the agile manifesto says https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/
- fatnoah 5y ago
  > The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. This is why, as a manager, I don't attend daily stand-ups. The meetings aren't for me. They're for the team. I've managed orgs where some teams had daily stand-ups, some twice a week, and others not at all. It was up to the team to decide what worked best for them. In return for this magnanimous gesture, all I asked was for the work board to reflect reality and that people raise any blockers that I could help out with.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  > Then you tune out as everyone else goes in their turn giving updates on something that doesn't affect what you're doing in any way whatsoever. Need smaller teams so that the people in your stand ups are actually collaborating on the same project. If the things people on your team are doing are not relevant to you, you're not a team in any real sense.
- vannevar 5y ago
  >The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. Then you've never seen scrum, regardless of what your manager told you.
  - ahelwer 5y ago
    “True scrum has never been tried”
    - vannevar 5y ago
      Nah, I've seen it done successfully many times. It's really not that hard if you actually try. What's described above isn't even close.
at_a_remove 5y ago
The real question is, does the Agile Manifesto accurately predict or reflect reality? Place I was working at, my boss arranged something of a coup so he could work for Boss-Boss-#2 instead of old, not "with it" Boss-Boss-#1. A project appeared, Boss-Boss-#2 wanted to meet with me. Told me we would be doing Agile, also when would I have this done? I hadn't seen anything at this point. Promised meetings with stakeholders; no such meetings occurred. And so on and so forth. But we were doing Agile, he said. Despite having zero to work with and being ill the entire time, I delivered ahead of the deadline. Turns out the deadline wasn't real, nobody looked at it for seven months. Felt very nimble, very Agile! It doesn't matter what the Manifesto says. It was written without orthodoxy. There are no section where it says, "If this doesn't happen, you are no longer Agile. The Stakeholders must be beaten with wooden rods, then they are to purify themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Should the PM fail to beat them with wooden rods, the PM is no longer Agile, and must be beaten by the devs." It has no teeth.
- vannevar 5y ago
  >It doesn't matter what the Manifesto says. Well, it doesn't matter if no one in the organization has read it or committed to its principles, sure. The same can be said for a constitution, a contract, or the Bible. Just because someone says they're "doing agile" doesn't mean they are. I can say I'm the King of France; just because I'm wrong doesn't mean France doesn't exist.

ahelwer 5y ago

Nobody cares what the agile manifesto says. The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. Of course, no developer actually makes uniform incremental daily progress so this really just turns into a demoralizing exercise in lying about what you did the previous day, punctuated by underselling the days where you actually got quite a bit done. Then you tune out as everyone else goes in their turn giving updates on something that doesn't affect what you're doing in any way whatsoever. The best weeks are when the manager goes on vacation so you don't have to put up with the daily bullshit. Also, every manager swears their scrum isn't like this. And every one of them is wrong.

worik 5y ago
> so this really just turns into a demoralizing exercise in lying about what you did the previous day What depressing places you worked. I have worked once at a firm that had a daily meeting of developers. It was very useful, no expectations, we kept each other informed. Why would you lie to your comrades? I can guess answers to that....
- ahelwer 5y ago
  See how many days in a row you can say "I didn't make progress yesterday" to your manager before it becomes an issue. Myself and all the best developers I know have days or weeks of doing very little punctuated by days or weeks of doing quite a lot. Of course, I don't lie to my comrades - as intimated by the quip about weeks where the manager leaves, we were very truthful with one another if we actually bothered having a daily scrum. Go ahead and posture online about how you would never overstate your accomplishments to your manager I guess.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    As a manager or co-worker, if you reported "no progress" a few days in a row, I'd ask why not. I would honestly be looking for ways to help you make progress because getting stuck in a rut sucks (and we've all been there). I don't care if some widget in Jira gets moved today or next Monday (but you're making progress to completing that feature/fix/whatever). I do care if you're literally making no progress.
    - ahelwer 5y ago
      And such help would not be useful, because these are problems of motivation. So to avoid such unhelpful help (which can often exacerbate issues - such are the mysteries of the self) I tell you everything is fine. Tally up my work at the end of the month and you'll be happy.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        If anything, questions like this would start piling on anxiety and pressure.
    - qqtt 5y ago
      Another angle is that in software development, it's pretty common to have days where there isn't much material progress but things are getting better understood by the developer themselves. Senior engineers in my experience are quite comfortable doing several days or even weeks of scoping, investigating, prototyping, and general maneuvering before coming to a solution that ends up taking a day or less. The constant need to interject with help when "no progress" flags are thrown gets into the realm of micromanagement, and that is doubly so when every day or even hour of "no progress" gets treated as a crisis that needs to be solved ASAP. Scrum fosters an environment of "no breathing room" for these frequent and common stretches of "no progress".
      - alistairSH 5y ago
        But scoping, investigating, prototyping, etc are all forms of progress. Tell me that's what you're doing. In my experience, "I got nothing done" is a giant red flag that the developer is actually stuck on something and not in a "I need a day or two to figure this out" way (because the developer would have said as much if that was the case).
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Nobody cares what the agile manifesto says https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/
fatnoah 5y ago
> The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. This is why, as a manager, I don't attend daily stand-ups. The meetings aren't for me. They're for the team. I've managed orgs where some teams had daily stand-ups, some twice a week, and others not at all. It was up to the team to decide what worked best for them. In return for this magnanimous gesture, all I asked was for the work board to reflect reality and that people raise any blockers that I could help out with.
jimbokun 5y ago
> Then you tune out as everyone else goes in their turn giving updates on something that doesn't affect what you're doing in any way whatsoever. Need smaller teams so that the people in your stand ups are actually collaborating on the same project. If the things people on your team are doing are not relevant to you, you're not a team in any real sense.
vannevar 5y ago
>The only way I have ever seen scrum manifest is as a daily meeting where everyone on the team reports their incremental daily progress to the manager. Then you've never seen scrum, regardless of what your manager told you.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  “True scrum has never been tried”
  - vannevar 5y ago
    Nah, I've seen it done successfully many times. It's really not that hard if you actually try. What's described above isn't even close.

at_a_remove 5y ago

The real question is, does the Agile Manifesto accurately predict or reflect reality? Place I was working at, my boss arranged something of a coup so he could work for Boss-Boss-#2 instead of old, not "with it" Boss-Boss-#1. A project appeared, Boss-Boss-#2 wanted to meet with me. Told me we would be doing Agile, also when would I have this done? I hadn't seen anything at this point. Promised meetings with stakeholders; no such meetings occurred. And so on and so forth. But we were doing Agile, he said. Despite having zero to work with and being ill the entire time, I delivered ahead of the deadline. Turns out the deadline wasn't real, nobody looked at it for seven months. Felt very nimble, very Agile! It doesn't matter what the Manifesto says. It was written without orthodoxy. There are no section where it says, "If this doesn't happen, you are no longer Agile. The Stakeholders must be beaten with wooden rods, then they are to purify themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Should the PM fail to beat them with wooden rods, the PM is no longer Agile, and must be beaten by the devs." It has no teeth.

vannevar 5y ago
>It doesn't matter what the Manifesto says. Well, it doesn't matter if no one in the organization has read it or committed to its principles, sure. The same can be said for a constitution, a contract, or the Bible. Just because someone says they're "doing agile" doesn't mean they are. I can say I'm the King of France; just because I'm wrong doesn't mean France doesn't exist.