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Ask HN: Does the Scrum Framework Work?

17 points by hahnbee 4y ago

At this point it feels like the underlying sentiment is that the scrum framework is a huge pain and everyone hates using it. But it also seems like the majority of companies still use the scrum framework and the Atlassian suite to guide their product development. Do people secretly like it? Or is it time for a new methodology to arise? Edit: I initially was asking about the agile methodology, but I was really referencing the scrum framework.

nivertech 4y ago
no
burstmode 4y ago
> Do people secretly like it? No
- whitesilhouette 4y ago
  Well the answer really depends on who you ask. The cathartic "No" only comes from the Dev side. If you ask the HR/Management, then that's gonna be a resounding orgasmic Yessss!
jeffwask 4y ago
If you are talking about the manifesto and guiding principles, it's great and you can build wonderful workflows using it. If you are are talking about the agile industrial complex, it should all burn in a garbage fire.
- hahnbee 4y ago
  What do you mean by the agile industrial complex? Are you specifically referring to all the rules such as the scrum master? Or are you talking about the Atlassian suite?
goto11 4y ago
First: Scrum and Agile is not the same thing. I think most people who say they hate Agile just hate Scrum. Agile (https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) is not a formalized process or methodology. It is a set of simple principles: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan These are pretty reasonable principles. Do they work? Better than what they were reacting against, which was the "specify and document everything in detail up front" methodologies.
- hahnbee 4y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. What are your opinions on Scrum?
- whitesilhouette 4y ago
  > Scrum and Agile is not the same thing. Agreed. Scrum is only a subset of Agile like Kanban (that has a different approach than Scrum), but they are both Agile.
- hahnbee 4y ago
  Edited my post to reflect this.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  The Agile Manifesto's concision is a double-edged sword. I'm familiar with them, of course, but I've always pined for a richer theoretical foundation to undergird them. Does such a exposition exist?
  - goto11 4y ago
    The problem is there is no "formula" for managing software project. People want a formula, which is why Scrum-as-a-product have been successful.
  - jdlshore 4y ago
    At the risk of self promotion, my book (The Art of Agile Development) attempts to balance explaining the underlying theory with providing pragmatic "how to" guidance. A lot of the theory is set up in the first chapter, which is online here: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile The rest of the theory is spread throughout the book, in "key ideas" sidebars (which you can find in the index) and the "Experiments and Alternatives" sections at the end of each practice. I'm not aware of any books that are purely about the underlying theory, but these books swing the pendulum more towards the theory side of things: Lean Software Development (Mary and Tom Poppendieck) - if you only read one, this is the one to read The Principles of Product Development Flow (Tom Reinertsen) Agile Software Development, 2nd. ed. (Alistair Cockburn) Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd ed. (Kent Beck) The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
mixmastamyk 4y ago
You may mean scrum, which is too bureaucratic for many/most projects.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  What part of scrum in particular do you find to be overly bureaucratic? I ask, because the totality of the Scrum Guide[1] is only 14 pages, and there just isn't very much about Scrum that is prescriptive. So I have.a hard time understanding this sentiment. Now there clearly are people doing something that they call "Scrum" which is some shitty made-up process they cobbled together themselves like Frankenstein's monster, with FSM-only-knows what kind of bureaucratic elements. But that's not pure Scrum per-se. [1]: https://scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2020/2020-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf https://scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2020/2020-Scrum-Gui...
  - rawgabbit 4y ago
    In many places, the project manager is still the project manager and micromanages the developers including who get to make architectural decisions, even though they are now called "Product Owner".
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Stand up and kickoff meeting have been a waste of time everywhere I've worked. Responsive async communication would be much better. IIRC, there was a specific case where helpful, but was lost when it went mainstream.
    - mindcrime 4y ago
      Fair enough. I agree that stand-ups can (usually? always?) be replaced with an async mechanism.
    - hahnbee 4y ago
      Yeah, I think the most common complaint about scrum (from engineers) is the stand up.
time0ut 4y ago
If you mean can a strong team follow an agile methodology and be successful, then definitely. If you mean can an agile methodology make a weak team successful, then I doubt it. I haven't seen a methodology that creates vision and discipline which are far more important than how you model your workflow.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Your "strong team" has to include product and engineering management, though, not just engineers. If you don't have management that "gets it", they're going to ruin the team's ability to actually be agile, because they're going to try to be "agile" according to some bureaucratic process.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    If you don't have management that "gets it", they're going to ruin the team's ability to actually be agile BINGO! I'd posit that a LOT (maybe most) teams that claim to be using Scrum or another "agile" methodology are totally screwing the pooch for this exact reason - management doesn't really "get it" and layers all of their shitty bureaucratic nonsense on top of the core agile methodology. That's the fault of shitty managers, not the fault of the methodology.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Well... yes, but it's not easy for the managers. There is a fundamental, total disconnect between the world of PERT charts and the agile world. That disconnect happens somewhere. If your manager gets agile, does their manager? Their manager's manager? Somewhere there has to be someone who can go both ways - who can be "agile down" and "non-agile up". If you don't have that person, then you get some flavor of "PERT chart agile", which isn't actually agile at all.
      - mindcrime 4y ago
        Truth. In actuality, it's best if the understanding of "agile" extends literally all the way to the CEO (and board). Not sure how many companies can claim this today though.
jdlshore 4y ago
There's a fundamental misunderstanding in your question. To begin with, Agile isn't a methodology. It's a way of thinking about development—a philosophy—that's defined at agilemanifesto.org. There are a bunch of methods that follow the Agile philosophy. Scrum and Extreme Programming are the most well known. Extreme Programming was popular in the early 2000s, but has since been eclipsed by Scrum. There are a bunch of companies and methods that claim to follow the Agile philosophy, but don't. SAFe ("Scaled Agile Framework") is the most well known. Additionally, because Scrum is so popular, most of the companies who claim to be "Agile" are actually using some cargo cult version of Scrum. So you'll get a lot of people complaining about Agile, when they're actually complaining about crappy Scrum and SAFe implementations. Personally, as someone who's been involved with the Agile community for a few decades, I would love to see Scrum replaced with Extreme Programming. My experience is that XP works much better than Scrum in practice, because it emphasizes engineering practices, whereas Scrum puts too much focus on Scrummasters and planning. Although Scrum has some good ideas, they're very nuanced, and tend to be misunderstood in a way that leads to micromanagement. Edit, since the OP was changed: Yes, Scrum works when done correctly. But most people don't do it correctly, because it's very bare-bones, which results in people layering their own preconceptions on top of it, most of which are distinctly anti-Agile. Additionally, Scrum pioneered the "Certified Scrummaster" (CSM) and "Certified Scrum Trainer" (CST) certifications, which were so lucrative that they attracted a lot of incompetent people into teaching Scrum. The CSM course is also too short and shallow to really teach people how to lead Scrum teams effectively, but is marketed as a panacea. The result has been a giant garbage fire.
- RayFrankenstein 4y ago
  Ah, one of the original 17 Snowbird Nazgûl Read this: https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README....
- mindcrime 4y ago
  whereas Scrum puts too much focuses on Scrummasters and planning. "Planning is essential, but a plan is useless." ~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- 4y ago
jstarfish 4y ago
It works best when you have projects with a lot of discrete components that can be delegated/outsourced to more parties than you can keep track of. In practice, all this does is crowdsource micromanagement (IMO why everyone hates it), but it's something of a necessary evil with complex projects. The problems arise when the "I need agile!" meme becomes reality and leaders adopt it for the sake of showmanship. If your incident responders are able to plan the incidents they'll work over the next sprint, you are clearly managing a team of saboteurs.
gls2ro 4y ago
I think we are past the peak of Scrum. IMHO Scrum was a prescription of how to be agile because being agile is a kind if philosophy and it is hard to make it work quickly without huge investment in the growth of each individual. Its main lets say purpose (not by its creators) was to disrupt Waterfall at scale and it managed to do that no matter if it works or not. But while Scrum worked well for the innovators adopting it it does not work at scale (nor does Safe or any other framework trying to fix it by adding more processes and roles). Actually most implementations of Scrum at scale are anti-agile, are rigid and products and teams will collapse (productivity wise) if tomorrow someone takes scrum out. Because they are trained to follow Scrum not to be agile. Agile means thriving in a fragile environment and Scrum does not teach people that. There are some new frameworks in the making. Solving some of the issues we encounter now but it is hard to predict which one will win if any. I for example really like Shape Up. I feel it allows teams to be agile while not being so focused on daily work.
toinebeg 4y ago
My main take after practising Agile and Scrum for a few years is that there is more in Agile than Scrum. For Scrum to work you need to enrich it with other ideas. There are less than 20 authors in the manifesto, go check what they were up to. Next to the management framework, there is a lot of engeneering techniques and ideas. A sibling comment talked about XP whose technics work well along scrum, but there is also clean code, refactoring, crystal methods, agile as a cooperative game, liberating structures, devops (no, not the job offer),... They all had blogs (archive. org is your friend for some of them), wrote books and gave talks. I like to get lost on http://wiki.c2.com/ http://wiki.c2.com/ where I found lots of insight about how to make the thing work. So yeah, I think it work pretty well when you learn how to use it.
pydry 4y ago
Scrum is to the Catholic Church what Agile is to Christianity. It's rigid, hierarchical, proscriptive and weirdly bureaucratic. If you follow all the rules they promise you'll end up in a better place. If you dont, it's because you didnt follow the rules precisely enough. They both believe in all the same sort of wishy washy stuff though.
rawgabbit 4y ago
From my perspective, part of the confusion is agile and scrum's contradictory aims. The concept of "MVP" is opposed to the concept of "Agile Project". MVP. I would argue when you bring up agile, most people are thinking of the allure of a small scrappy startup with 2-pizza size teams who by herculean effort create a Minimum Viable Prototype in record time. Nevermind, the MVP was built with little concern for scalability, security, or enterprise integration. Speed to market is the driving force behind startup culture and trying to grab market share. The idea is that once you get market share and more funding, then you can think of documenting and optimizing your code. Agile Project. In practice, most people are really running "Agile Projects". They invest considerable time upfront to interview, document, and get signoff on project requirements… before they even start coding. Does this sound like waterfall? After they get the requirements, then they develop using scrum practices and ceremonies. (Nitpick, "ceremony" is a terrible word choice as it means those activities have no meat or value [1]). E.g. 18F's Agile based project approach requires "We conduct discovery research before we build anything. Depending on the complexity of your problem space, this can take up to 2 to 3 months." [2] [1] https://turboscrum.com/the-fascinating-origin-of-the-term-scrum-ceremony/ https://turboscrum.com/the-fascinating-origin-of-the-term-sc... [2] https://agile.18f.gov/18f-agile-approach/ https://agile.18f.gov/18f-agile-approach/
- icedchai 4y ago
  "Ceremony" is the perfect term. These scrum practices generally have very little value. Daily standups could be replaced with asynchronous updates (Slack, Email, whatever) and a meeting once or twice a week. "Retros" are useless 98% of the time. I'd often feel like I was being forced to participate and provide bullshit answers just so someone could fill out a spreadsheet and file his TPS report.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Much appreciated! This sort of interaction is exactly why I love HN. Thank you
jdlshore 4y ago
Correction - The Principles of Product Development Flow is by Donald Reinertsen.

nescioquid 4y ago

I think it really boils down to "use your best judgement", but people are usually uncomfortable with that. In terms of theory for agile practice, one typically sees discussion of industrial control theory and analogies based on thermostatic controls, but it seems surface-deep to me.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
If I'm being completely honest, the brevity of the Agile Manifesto is the root cause of cargo cult agile. By not resting on a solid theoretical or practical base, the result is practitioners who implement agile by asthetics. People who do agile without understanding its goals or which problems it attempts to solve create incoherent development systems that look like agile on the surface but introduce flaws that undermine the agile project. Surely, this should sound familiar.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  > ...the brevity of the Agile Manifesto is the root cause of cargo cult agile. I don't disagree with you, which is why I say that the manifesto is really just actually asking you to exercise your best judgement, given the set of values it proposes. The pragmatic attempts to provide a methodology only give you a list of "thou shalts" that remove the need for people to exercise best judgement in the first place (which is somewhat defeating). There is some software engineering literature that attempts to provide a theoretical foundation, as I mentioned, but while interesting, I haven't found them terribly useful: people just want a list of commandments to follow. Is that the manifesto's fault? Personally, I think the manifesto is probably best used like a diagnostic check-list to understand how screwed up your current work context actually is.

hahnbee 4y ago

What does it even mean for everybody to "get it"?

hahnbee 4y ago

That's interesting. I feel like the whole point of implementing something as bureaucratic as scrum is specifically to have high visibility over individuals that could be slacking and keeping them in check (AKA components of a weak team). If your team is already high performing and successful I would be of the opinion that they don't need to follow the scrum framework. Although I agree with you in that I'm not sure if implementing scrum will necessarily mean that it will make a weak team successful.

treis 4y ago

IMHO if they follow the principles of agile or scrum it will make a weak team better. Simply shipping something no matter how small every 2-4 weeks can fix a whole swath of problems. Or if not fix at least bring them to light.

Interesting, thank you for the insight. I've only ever been exposed to SAFe and always thought it was too detailed and not flexible enough to be applicable to every team/scenario. It's interesting to know that it was actually people misinterpreting Agile. Would you say that practicing the agile philosophy generally looks different on a team-by-team basis?

jdlshore 4y ago
It must. Although it’s useful to start from a predefined point, for the purpose of learning, and it’s useful to have some consistency among multiple teams working on the same product, one of the Agile principles is that teams continuously adapt their process to make it better.