5 ms·

Scrum Has Failed the Developers

50 points by lawgimenez 4y ago

typingcyclist 4y ago
I doubt that Scrum is about helping developers or whatever this post is trying to imply. It's a very mechanical framework with rigid rules and meetings. It's very fragile and breaks apart as soon as you try to change something. One place where it actually makes sense is when trying to move away from a chaos into a more structured process. This is where Scrum is useful, because it comes with rules to introduce this structure. But it never failed developers, that target group is business people, promising to deliver more in a shorter time via rigid time-boxing.
hmmmcurious1 4y ago
The developers weren't the target audience anyway. The decision makers in upper management however...
melling 4y ago
“Scrum (and Agile as a whole) promised to liberate the developers” No it didn’t. It was a process formalized by people who needed extra structure. It gave the priesthood the ability to run in place a little faster, accomplishing no more work than before. I anxiously await the next Silver Bullet. For now, let’s get back to Maker’s Time: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
mkl95 4y ago
Scrum cannot fail developers because it's not intended to help them. It's mostly a status report framework based on management pseudoscience.
- heurisko 4y ago
  I think scrum is best understood as a push back of waterfall. Breaking large parts of work into small chunks, where it makes sense, which are testable and negotiable is better than the massive brittle project designs that collapsed under their own weight, with nothing to show for it. Of course, not everything can be done in small chunks. But a lot can be.
  - picsao 4y ago
    Waterfall is a constructed counter example. Nobody out side of safety sensitive fields like aerospace or the military ever used it and there it is only used because the requirements force it upon the developers. What good can a paradigm do, which basic starting approach is to define itself as counter move to a strawman.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      This. I've been programming professionally for decades before Agile-like stuff was around, and I've never seen the process they describe as "waterfall". I think it's entirely made up.
    - tomByrer 4y ago
      Waterfall was more wide-spread, though perhaps not around you. Sounded very normalized here: https://youtu.be/hxXmTnb3mFU?list=PLakykuPxo3ch60vi4JeOieW4PQtxqeRsk&t=675 https://youtu.be/hxXmTnb3mFU?list=PLakykuPxo3ch60vi4JeOieW4P...
    - heurisko 4y ago
      UK government projects suffered significantly from Waterfall planning, with nothing to show for it at the end. This lead to the Government Digital Service who cite the failings of Waterfall. > Using waterfall methods means you may spend 18 months building a service that no longer meets government policy, cannot work with the latest technology and does not meet users' needs. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/agile-government-services-introduction https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/agile-gover...
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Scrum has it's place in project management but not at the code writing level. There ere just too many unknows to be able to deliver good code on a set time schedule. It's way more important to have competent project managers that know coding and developers that are motivated to deliver on time in a team environment. Scrum and any other tool will not fix that.
- hungryforcodes 4y ago
  >here ere just too many unknows to be able to deliver good code on a set time schedule. So let's not try? No estimates at all then? I'm not sure how you how can include the role of project manager in the same post when saying estimates don't work at all. By definition one of a PM's core duties is to estimate the time, cost, quality of a project. The main role of agile is not to deliver super accurate estimates anyways, but to make everyone involved in the project aware of what work needs to be done and then make sensible decisions around this. Seen this way, I think it works well. There are ways to know how much can be done in a sprint.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Barely anyone applies it that way. It is just authoritarianism with a different coat of paint, at least in my 20 years long career it inevitably always was. There are no problems with giving estimates. The problems start when managers first say "don't worry if it's not accurate, just give me an estimate" and the next week say "it's not okay to give a wrong estimate". It's no use, man. I communicated with quite a few of them. They don't do anything and just panic when their manager gets unhappy and start putting pressure on their team. That's it. That's all. There's rarely any other process going on. I recently did work for two organizations that weren't that stupid and allowed leeway and had flatter structure. I liked them but they were prone to succumb to the council of elders trope where a few seniors basically decided everything and stopped listening to arguments. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should also read some history and ask people who have been through it as well. And everyone and their dog are convinced that them and only them know the secret sauce that will finally solve management (lol). Human ego is fascinating, isn't it?
xony 4y ago
pydry 4y ago
I dont like scrum but I did like that it did manage to convince managers I worked for circa 2009ish to do away with arbitrary deadlines (which were common until that point).
- greenbit 4y ago
  Waterfall could only induce death march mode when deadlines loomed. With two-week "sprints" and management that expects the product of every sprint should be an improved deliverable (whether it's actually delivered or not is beside the point), you get the deadline effect every other week. Soon it just blurs into never ending death march.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  It's funny, every company I've worked at that has a quarterly earnings report managed to have deadlines, sometimes soft-ish.
  - nivertech 4y ago
    2 weeks is too small deadline to implement something meaningful and/or non-trivial. Many modern SDLCs and informal methods used by FAANG are using 6 weeks cycles. Two 6 week cycles can fit to a single quarter (~ 13 weeks). Also works better with quarterly OKRs/KPIs, and with Amazon PR/FAQ. The latter I think for semiannual (2 quarters).
dijit 4y ago
Most project management frameworks are tricky. The best is to have no project management. Just a stream of ideas and high trust to prioritise effectively in an autonomous way. This only works when you have full alignment and everyone is competent at managing their own time and expectations. Invariably someone will get flustered with this approach because they need visibility or believe things to be unaligned and hamfist scrum into the process. They usually do this with Jira and then claim there’s no better software. So we have two bits of pain for the price of one. I really believe that we have a real lack of competence in project management in general; estimations are hard for sure, but reaching for tools without understanding trade offs is the kind of thing mid-level engineers do; seniors usually being marked by not adapting to tools but making tools work for their ends. This is all a digression and what I originally wanted to say was that IME; scrum is the cart leading the horse. Agile is also a difficult fit for something brand new; as how can you get user stories properly told without having users? but I think it’s quite good for refining something existing.
- chaosbutters314 4y ago
  excel is still the best project management tool I've used. jira is just a mess at this point
  - Klinky 4y ago
    I agree that Jira is not the best project management tool, but it wasn't really designed to be one. It's not terrible a work tracking, but it seems to lacking in the roadmap/pre-planning departments that project/product should be using to feed developers work. That said, spreadsheets are also not great project management tools either, quickly becoming messy and out of date. Nor do I think relying on senior devs to roll their own project management tools is a good idea. I'd like to see more WBS(work breakdown structure) tools used to identify needs in advance and ways to monitor their implementation, testing & deployment. The industry's love affair with agile seems to lead to pre-planning & consistent structure being seen as "too waterfall". Basically it feels like no one does agile "correctly", and those that it's worked well for, likely have a workflow and product cycle that aligns with it well, but that may not be true for all products, tech, stacks, etc. Ultimately we're trying to answer these basic questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it? When will it be done? Is it actually done? If those questions cannot be answered easily there are probably gaps in your workflow.
fpdavis 4y ago
If Scrum is failing developers in your environment, then it is being implemented wrong. Fundamentally it should give more control to developers, break down large tasks into smaller tasks, and help management determine better what projects/tasks to direct resources to.
- xedrac 4y ago
  I don't know anyone that likes scrum. If everyone hates scrum because its "being implemented wrong", then wouldn't it follow that scrum is fundamentally broken in some way?
michael1999 4y ago
Scrum's formal, recurring decision meetings allows executives to retain the role of decision maker while avoiding participation in the daily rhythms of creation. Of all of the currents in the agile wave, Scrum was the one with the most formal process, and the one that most prioritized the needs of external stakeholders. It might be the best that you can do in organizations that will never delegate actual authority down to the team, but it doesn't make it pretty, or effective.
camgunz 4y ago
This is a pretty good article IMO; it pegs exactly why Scrum failed: the company has to change and not crunch developers. It requires a change in power structures, and it's pretty rare for a software delivery methodology to cause that. I wonder how much successful software is developed with Agile/Scrum. Safari? OpenJDK? My line of inquiry here is: what is Agile/Scrum about? Is it software Marxism (the workers seizing the means of production)? Is it process (mass production)? Is it software Protestantism (waterfall is Catholicism)? Is it vague unfalsifiable snake oil? Are other similar things (microservices, hexagonal architecture, DDD, functional programming, OOP) in this group? I honestly don't know, and I welcome a serious discussion about it.
mbrodersen 4y ago
30+ years of development experience here. The #1 management tool that really works is a simple prioritised list. Whether you are managing a team or yourself. Tasks gets assigned in priority order and if a task is blocked then you pause and pick the next one on the list. The prioritised list is also excellent for negotiating with stake holders. Simply ask them to place what they want in the priority list. It makes it really obvious to the stakeholders what the trade offs are.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  What you have described is pretty much Kanban.
  - mbrodersen 4y ago
    No Kanban is more involved. You can have multiple tasks in flight, you limit tasks per column etc. Kanban is IMHO for more complicated stuff (large scale manufacturing with multiple departments for example).

50 points by lawgimenez 4y ago

I doubt that Scrum is about helping developers or whatever this post is trying to imply. It's a very mechanical framework with rigid rules and meetings. It's very fragile and breaks apart as soon as you try to change something. One place where it actually makes sense is when trying to move away from a chaos into a more structured process. This is where Scrum is useful, because it comes with rules to introduce this structure. But it never failed developers, that target group is business people, promising to deliver more in a shorter time via rigid time-boxing.

hmmmcurious1 4y ago

The developers weren't the target audience anyway. The decision makers in upper management however...

melling 4y ago

“Scrum (and Agile as a whole) promised to liberate the developers” No it didn’t. It was a process formalized by people who needed extra structure. It gave the priesthood the ability to run in place a little faster, accomplishing no more work than before. I anxiously await the next Silver Bullet. For now, let’s get back to Maker’s Time: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

mkl95 4y ago

Scrum cannot fail developers because it's not intended to help them. It's mostly a status report framework based on management pseudoscience.

heurisko 4y ago
I think scrum is best understood as a push back of waterfall. Breaking large parts of work into small chunks, where it makes sense, which are testable and negotiable is better than the massive brittle project designs that collapsed under their own weight, with nothing to show for it. Of course, not everything can be done in small chunks. But a lot can be.
- picsao 4y ago
  Waterfall is a constructed counter example. Nobody out side of safety sensitive fields like aerospace or the military ever used it and there it is only used because the requirements force it upon the developers. What good can a paradigm do, which basic starting approach is to define itself as counter move to a strawman.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    This. I've been programming professionally for decades before Agile-like stuff was around, and I've never seen the process they describe as "waterfall". I think it's entirely made up.
  - tomByrer 4y ago
    Waterfall was more wide-spread, though perhaps not around you. Sounded very normalized here: https://youtu.be/hxXmTnb3mFU?list=PLakykuPxo3ch60vi4JeOieW4PQtxqeRsk&t=675 https://youtu.be/hxXmTnb3mFU?list=PLakykuPxo3ch60vi4JeOieW4P...
  - heurisko 4y ago
    UK government projects suffered significantly from Waterfall planning, with nothing to show for it at the end. This lead to the Government Digital Service who cite the failings of Waterfall. > Using waterfall methods means you may spend 18 months building a service that no longer meets government policy, cannot work with the latest technology and does not meet users' needs. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/agile-government-services-introduction https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/agile-gover...

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Scrum has it's place in project management but not at the code writing level. There ere just too many unknows to be able to deliver good code on a set time schedule. It's way more important to have competent project managers that know coding and developers that are motivated to deliver on time in a team environment. Scrum and any other tool will not fix that.

hungryforcodes 4y ago
>here ere just too many unknows to be able to deliver good code on a set time schedule. So let's not try? No estimates at all then? I'm not sure how you how can include the role of project manager in the same post when saying estimates don't work at all. By definition one of a PM's core duties is to estimate the time, cost, quality of a project. The main role of agile is not to deliver super accurate estimates anyways, but to make everyone involved in the project aware of what work needs to be done and then make sensible decisions around this. Seen this way, I think it works well. There are ways to know how much can be done in a sprint.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Barely anyone applies it that way. It is just authoritarianism with a different coat of paint, at least in my 20 years long career it inevitably always was. There are no problems with giving estimates. The problems start when managers first say "don't worry if it's not accurate, just give me an estimate" and the next week say "it's not okay to give a wrong estimate". It's no use, man. I communicated with quite a few of them. They don't do anything and just panic when their manager gets unhappy and start putting pressure on their team. That's it. That's all. There's rarely any other process going on. I recently did work for two organizations that weren't that stupid and allowed leeway and had flatter structure. I liked them but they were prone to succumb to the council of elders trope where a few seniors basically decided everything and stopped listening to arguments. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should also read some history and ask people who have been through it as well. And everyone and their dog are convinced that them and only them know the secret sauce that will finally solve management (lol). Human ego is fascinating, isn't it?

xony 4y ago

pydry 4y ago

I dont like scrum but I did like that it did manage to convince managers I worked for circa 2009ish to do away with arbitrary deadlines (which were common until that point).

greenbit 4y ago
Waterfall could only induce death march mode when deadlines loomed. With two-week "sprints" and management that expects the product of every sprint should be an improved deliverable (whether it's actually delivered or not is beside the point), you get the deadline effect every other week. Soon it just blurs into never ending death march.
Yhippa 4y ago
It's funny, every company I've worked at that has a quarterly earnings report managed to have deadlines, sometimes soft-ish.
- nivertech 4y ago
  2 weeks is too small deadline to implement something meaningful and/or non-trivial. Many modern SDLCs and informal methods used by FAANG are using 6 weeks cycles. Two 6 week cycles can fit to a single quarter (~ 13 weeks). Also works better with quarterly OKRs/KPIs, and with Amazon PR/FAQ. The latter I think for semiannual (2 quarters).

dijit 4y ago

Most project management frameworks are tricky. The best is to have no project management. Just a stream of ideas and high trust to prioritise effectively in an autonomous way. This only works when you have full alignment and everyone is competent at managing their own time and expectations. Invariably someone will get flustered with this approach because they need visibility or believe things to be unaligned and hamfist scrum into the process. They usually do this with Jira and then claim there’s no better software. So we have two bits of pain for the price of one. I really believe that we have a real lack of competence in project management in general; estimations are hard for sure, but reaching for tools without understanding trade offs is the kind of thing mid-level engineers do; seniors usually being marked by not adapting to tools but making tools work for their ends. This is all a digression and what I originally wanted to say was that IME; scrum is the cart leading the horse. Agile is also a difficult fit for something brand new; as how can you get user stories properly told without having users? but I think it’s quite good for refining something existing.

chaosbutters314 4y ago
excel is still the best project management tool I've used. jira is just a mess at this point
- Klinky 4y ago
  I agree that Jira is not the best project management tool, but it wasn't really designed to be one. It's not terrible a work tracking, but it seems to lacking in the roadmap/pre-planning departments that project/product should be using to feed developers work. That said, spreadsheets are also not great project management tools either, quickly becoming messy and out of date. Nor do I think relying on senior devs to roll their own project management tools is a good idea. I'd like to see more WBS(work breakdown structure) tools used to identify needs in advance and ways to monitor their implementation, testing & deployment. The industry's love affair with agile seems to lead to pre-planning & consistent structure being seen as "too waterfall". Basically it feels like no one does agile "correctly", and those that it's worked well for, likely have a workflow and product cycle that aligns with it well, but that may not be true for all products, tech, stacks, etc. Ultimately we're trying to answer these basic questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it? When will it be done? Is it actually done? If those questions cannot be answered easily there are probably gaps in your workflow.

fpdavis 4y ago

If Scrum is failing developers in your environment, then it is being implemented wrong. Fundamentally it should give more control to developers, break down large tasks into smaller tasks, and help management determine better what projects/tasks to direct resources to.

xedrac 4y ago
I don't know anyone that likes scrum. If everyone hates scrum because its "being implemented wrong", then wouldn't it follow that scrum is fundamentally broken in some way?

michael1999 4y ago

Scrum's formal, recurring decision meetings allows executives to retain the role of decision maker while avoiding participation in the daily rhythms of creation. Of all of the currents in the agile wave, Scrum was the one with the most formal process, and the one that most prioritized the needs of external stakeholders. It might be the best that you can do in organizations that will never delegate actual authority down to the team, but it doesn't make it pretty, or effective.

camgunz 4y ago

This is a pretty good article IMO; it pegs exactly why Scrum failed: the company has to change and not crunch developers. It requires a change in power structures, and it's pretty rare for a software delivery methodology to cause that. I wonder how much successful software is developed with Agile/Scrum. Safari? OpenJDK? My line of inquiry here is: what is Agile/Scrum about? Is it software Marxism (the workers seizing the means of production)? Is it process (mass production)? Is it software Protestantism (waterfall is Catholicism)? Is it vague unfalsifiable snake oil? Are other similar things (microservices, hexagonal architecture, DDD, functional programming, OOP) in this group? I honestly don't know, and I welcome a serious discussion about it.

mbrodersen 4y ago

30+ years of development experience here. The #1 management tool that really works is a simple prioritised list. Whether you are managing a team or yourself. Tasks gets assigned in priority order and if a task is blocked then you pause and pick the next one on the list. The prioritised list is also excellent for negotiating with stake holders. Simply ask them to place what they want in the priority list. It makes it really obvious to the stakeholders what the trade offs are.

Tagbert 4y ago
What you have described is pretty much Kanban.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  No Kanban is more involved. You can have multiple tasks in flight, you limit tasks per column etc. Kanban is IMHO for more complicated stuff (large scale manufacturing with multiple departments for example).