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Does it ever occur to Scrum people that it’s not a good idea to spend your entire life in a mad state of sprinting? Marathon runners don’t sprint 100m, then spr
by chrisseaton 4y ago
Does it ever occur to Scrum people that it’s not a good idea to spend your entire life in a mad state of sprinting? Marathon runners don’t sprint 100m, then sprint another 100m, repeatedly, to cover the distance of a race.
- somewhat_drunk 4y agoWould you rather call it a saunter?
- hbrn 4y agoAs someone recently said it here, the difference between software development and marathon is that marathon runners know their destination.
- chrisseaton 4y agoOrienteers then? They don’t know their destination until they have their next waypoint. It’s not healthy to live in an eternally manic state of having to sprint at work.
- hbrn 4y agoOrienteering definitely fits better. And it's a competitive sport. It might not be healthy, but that's how you win.
- hinkley 4y agoNot all who wander are lost. A hiker or a marathon runner or a club cyclist not currently at an event have a destination: where they started. But the good stuff happens in the middle, and that’s not necessarily planned out in advance. Pacing is even more important then because there may be nobody to come bail you out, or it might take hours for them to do so.
- tomatotomato37 4y agoSo do sprinting runners, unless something has gone horribly wrong in the track design. Maybe we should get rid of the running analogies altogether and adopt the term "voyage" instead
- rob74 4y agoOr "journey" - then you can explore philosophical concepts like "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey" to help cope with projects that never get finished...
- commandlinefan 4y ago> marathon runners know their destination Hell, in this analogy even the marathon organizers don't know the destination. Or much care.
- hbrn 4y agoIdeally, during first few years organizers are runners. They don't know the destination, but they care more than anyone.
- mrguyorama 4y agoI'm tired of pretending software developers don't know their destination. If you started making a task-tracking app, and after all the work for scrum end up building a video game instead, something has gone terribly wrong.
- chrisseaton 4y agoDidn’t Slack do that exact thing, but the other way around, and are now worth 20 billion?
- hbrn 4y agoWhile I personally don't believe it, one could easily explain it with survivorship bias.
- Macha 4y agoThe founder even did it twice. The last time he set out to make a video game, he came out the other end with Flickr
- nivertech 4y agoAccording to its inventor, Scrum™ was created to manage a team of dysfunctional COBOL programmers at a bank[1], not to find a Product/Market Fit (PM/F). Instead of using an SDLC methodology here, use one of the relevant product frameworks for that, but needless to say, there is a large element of luck here, as finding a PM/F isn't guaranteed. Usually you use low-tech SDLCs like Scrum/SAFe at the places that already have found PM/F, or those relying on violence (aka "taxation") as their main business model (e.g. military/government/public sector). The only PM/F Scrum Inc found is how to make bazillions from useless certifications and training. -- [1] Scrum | Dr Jeff Sutherland | Talks at Google https://youtu.be/2L1oBLTICx4?t=1217 https://youtu.be/2L1oBLTICx4?t=1217
- rob74 4y agoPlus they ended up with the most elaborate Easter eggs I have seen in a web app: https://slack.com/404 https://slack.com/404
- theshrike79 4y agoMarathon has a clear route and a clear end point defined before the starter gun goes off. Now imagine a marathon run by a drunk monkey who changes the route on a whim every 30 minutes. Who wins, the sprinters who sprint for 30 minutes and check where the next target is or the marathon runners who are still going by the original plan?
- chrisseaton 4y agoWell nobody can keep up a sprint pace for 30 mins let alone a marathon distance, so those people will burn out before they get that far.
- _gabe_ 4y agoWell, one man can[0], but in general this is very true. My team was talking about this same thing a few days ago, as one of our team members got switched to a new team that sprints all the time. You can't sprint your whole life, it's much better to pace yourself and avoid burnout/injury. [0]: https://youtu.be/A73HQwEct-o https://youtu.be/A73HQwEct-o
- wahnfrieden 4y agoemployers are happy to let people "burn out" via exiting after a number of years of consistent sprinting because hiring occasional replacements can also be useful in other ways and the social cost of those burnout patterns isn't really the company's concern. so as often said at companies/by management, try to connect your view on what an individual's healthiest or most productive life would be to what is actually valuable to their employer as a business
- troupe 4y agoThe value of a sprint is to help keep everyone focused on how to deliver something of value and usually this means working with the customer to figure out how to make sure you deliver the valuable pieces while deferring the pieces that can wait until later. So basically making sure everyone is able to work efficiently. If they are being used to try to make people work more hours every week, then they are missing the point.
- clumsysmurf 4y agoWhy need a "push" sprint for that, a "pull" priority queue like XP is just fine. Then demo every few weeks plus or minus, when there is something tangible to show.
- troupe 4y agoI prefer pull systems and most teams I've seen that are more concerned about following Agile than following Scrum eventually evolve from Scrum to something that looks more like Kanban. If you regularly talk about how to make things better, pull systems tend to emerge. But sprints are often a reasonable step especially for teams that are part of a large organization. It is often easier (and faster) to move a team from waterfall to sprints to a pull system than it is to go from waterfall to a pull system directly.
- nivertech 4y agoCan you please show me a single example of a real company working under classical waterfall in the last decade? NOTE: informal SDLCs, mini-waterfall, and RUP are not classical waterfall. Agile™/Scrum® consultants implanted false memories to so many people. My colleagues who worked with me under lightweight flavor of RUP using an incremental approach, after getting Scrum Master certification now referring to it as "waterfall" ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nivertech 4y ago
- de6u99er 4y agoEstimates are done by developers. If devs think they must do things quickly it's up to them to communicate estimates that will make their life stressful. My approach was not to challenge estimates except if I thought they were too low, which led my teams to almost always meet their sprint goals.
- isitmadeofglass 4y agoThis is true, but in reality what happens a team has estimated that 40 points of work is need to reach the point that management has requested, for a 30point capacity sprint, it always ends up being a discussion with the team about “scaling down estimation” and never a discussion about “how do we break it to management that what they have requested is impossible to achieve”
- yrgulation 4y agoDoesnt matter, if you cant keep the pace they’ll pip or underperform you and then throw you out.
- WorldMaker 4y agoThat's always bugged me as a broken analogy, too. In college it was an extremely common aphorism "It's a marathon, not a sprint" as reminder to sustainably pace yourself and it has always seemed like Scrum originators had heard that phrase and gotten it exactly backward and it stuck. In marathon pacing analogy terms, "Split" would be the more accurate term. Though I know a lot of people don't think that sounds as good as "Sprint" does. Personally, I've often preferred just calling them "Fortnights" as an accurate description for "two-week process" (and a useful callback to long watches in older times). (Though the game "Fortnite" has confused that term a bit recently among the youth. "What does this have to do with the shooter?" Sigh.)
- chrisseaton 4y agoMaybe a 'lap'.
- WorldMaker 4y agoThe original legendary Marathon was a run between the cities of Marathon and Athens. No loops in that course to consider "a lap". 'Lap' doesn't fit the analogy quite right either. (Some modern street Marathons do use lapping courses today, but that is more for simplifying the logistics of getting people back to their cars and such from the finish line as anything proper to the "form" of a Marathon.)
- chrisseaton 4y ago> The original legendary Marathon was a run between the cities of Marathon and Athens. Why's it have to be a marathon in your mind? Any race - doesn't have to be that literal.
- WorldMaker 4y agoThe reason for picking a marathon as the specific analogy, which Scrum intended to do (but got backwards) is that: 1) It's a (very) long haul. Pacing yourself is mandatory. (In most of the legends of the first marathon, the runner collapsed to the death after delivering his message in Athens.) 2) It's explicitly an A to B with a long-term goal in mind. From software product idea to finished software, in theory. (This part of the Scrum analogy has largely been forgotten/ignored/killed of course in the modern view of software as a constant Ship of Theseus that is never finished and always has infinite backlog.) 3) Pacing yourself while running a marathon consists of breaking your run into smaller time boxes. Most runners do plan specific paces for different "splits" within a marathon. Some runners pay coaches lots of money to try to come up with these plans. (Again, here Scrum screwed up the analogy by using the exact wrong term, "Sprint": a short fast race where pace is as fast as possible, and no need to think about "the next mile" after the "Sprint".) 4) The type of race doesn't change in a marathon. A triathlon might make a similarly good long haul project development metaphor if you have to shift entirely different contexts every so often (swimming, biking, running), but software development doesn't (necessarily) have drastic context switches like that. "Mile to mile" ("week to week") in software development you are still largely doing the same tasks. I kind of agree with the Scrum originators that the marathon was a good analogy for software development projects. I just wish they hadn't immediately broken the analogy by getting fundamentals wrong like the relationship between Marathons and Sprints. (ETA: I'm not myself a runner. Most of what I know is from siblings and friends and trying to be a good sideline supporter.)
- 1123581321 4y agoYes, and there have been some attempts to popularize longer cycles with saner breaks built in. 37signals’ Shape Up methodology is one, for example.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago> Does it ever occur to Scrum people that it’s not a good idea to spend your entire life in a mad state of sprinting? It’s just a word. Variables can be constant and constants can have values that are different from time to time, yet programming isn’t a futile endeavor. You’d think that people who create software could abstract from words but no, we are doomed to repeat again and again that “sprint” is just a word that was chosen to signify that in one time boxed period you are trying to reach a given destination, not to get as far as possible. In safe they call them iterations instead of sprints. But it doesn’t matter what word you use, what matters is the definitions and intents. Would a sprint by any other name not smell as sweet?