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The best effects I've seen from agile practices have been getting everyone to frequently think about deadline/feature trade-offs, reducing the occurrence of sur

The best effects I've seen from agile practices have been getting everyone to frequently think about deadline/feature trade-offs, reducing the occurrence of surprise bad news. I'm sure this is possible without "agile", but it's a thing I've seen it aid with. The worst is probably standups-gone-wrong. There's little more demoralizing than a 20-person 3-team standup where you couldn't possibly care about what anyone says (because it's irrelevant to you) except three or four people, and you already know what they're going to say because you all, you know, talk, and then also having to turn yesterday's work into some epic (LOL) tale of adventure and adversity because your manager's in the meeting and that's the kind of dumb-shit tone they've set for it ("now—justify why I should continue paying you" with pointed, bordering-on-hostile follow-up questions to anyone without a sufficiently-convincing theatrical performance) and you'd like to keep your job. Starting every day with a half-hour of that shit. JFC. But, I'm pretty sure, overall, agile is one of those things where most places that it works, any halfway-reasonable system would have worked just as well, and places where it doesn't, no system was going to work.

darreninthenet 4y ago
This is where a decent Scrum Master or Agile Coach makes such a massive difference... I've seen what you're describing so many times and it's a simple fix to get people to stop focusing on what they've done and to instead focus on what the team needs to do (ie focus on work not yet complete for the team and not what on the individual has done/will do)
- marcinzm 4y ago
  People care and should care about what they get rewarded for. If promotions/raises/bonuses are based on the manager's view of your personal work, as is the case at most companies, then that is exactly what a sane person should focus on. Removing the manager from the standup or adding another layer of a Scrum Master won't change that but merely change how they get that same information. Standup at least provides an equal opportunity for everyone to sell themselves in those cases.
  - Pamar 4y ago
    So people with better communication skills would get rewarded more than people contributing more on the actual delivery side?
    - Scarblac 4y ago
      He's not suggesting that's how it should work, he's saying that's how it does work at most places. It's my experience too.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      As the other comment said I'm simply noting the unfortunately reality that what matters is rarely actual delivery. Trying to avoid that reality won't make things more tied to delivery but simply more opaque as to what they're tied to. There's exceptions but in my experience those teams don't bother with these types of deep discussions on process. The process is somewhat irrelevant since the expectations are fairly clear and what they will be measured on is also fairly clear.
  - darreninthenet 4y ago
    If the SM is seen as or becomes a layer between the team and management, they aren't doing their job correctly
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  All those people do is make me disgruntled knowing it's someone's _job_ to run this bullshit circus. Automate the lot of it away, don't make it someone's career.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Good in theory In practice, any standup format where developers show up and basically perform to some standards set by a “master” or “coach” is kind of doomed to feel a little bit like a circus show. The problem is the existence of someone else running the show in these meetings. The best standup I’ve had were those run by the engineers themselves. Adding a “coach” or “master” just makes everything worse unless the team is really bad at communicating with each other, in which case you have bigger problems.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Lord knows what people are calling coaching these days. But if they're actually coaching, then yes, getting the team to run the meeting was exactly my goal when I did that kind of work. But that can be tricky. The biggest issue is to train managers to not make it about the manager. For that, an external coach is especially helpful, because it's the rare engineer who can sit their boss down and say, "Look, you're destroying this meeting. How about you not show up for the next two weeks, and then optionally show up but never speak for a month after that?" But even once you've created a space where power doesn't distort everything, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. People who talk too much or too little. People are unkind, rude, cutting, or outright mean. People who talk about the wrong things. People who don't even know what to do if there isn't a manager around to try to please. The truth is that for most people in the industry, their median meeting is bad. People with shorter careers may never have experienced a good meeting. So expecting them to just figure out how to have an excellent meeting every day is asking a lot. Especially a stand-up, which has pretty sharp constraints. If a team already knows or quickly figures it out, great. But a coach can really help.
  - darreninthenet 4y ago
    This would be the goal of a decent coach, to ultimately not be needed by the team you're working with (ie they run things by themselves)
- markrages 4y ago
  Scrum works best if you can find a true Scotsman to be the Scrum Master.
  - mech422 4y ago
    I snorted...stealing that line for future use :-) You win the interwebz for today :-D
- rjh29 4y ago
  > whenever agile project fail, agile shaman say "you didn't do agile right!" grug note this awfully convenient for agile shaman, ask more shiney rock better agile train young grugs on agile, danger!
  - paiute 4y ago
    pure marxism has never tried! if only we try the pure version it will work better! Marx had some good idea, communism stinks. Agile manifesto has good ideas Agile stinks. Maybe not as bad, but let's move on
    - lmm 4y ago
      I've found a direct correlation that the more closely a workplace conformed to the Agile manifesto, the better it was to work in. It absolutely does work in practice, and where it doesn't work I have always found specific, actionable places where they were doing it wrong. At some point you do have to actually spend 5 minutes to try to understand and follow the methodology - I don't think there's any methodology that claims you can ignore everything it tells you, do the oppsite of what it says half the time, and it will still improve your organisation. (Unfortunately I haven't found any correlation between how much an employer talks about Agile and how closely they actually follow it)
  - darreninthenet 4y ago
    I know you're being somewhat flippant but if agile shaman blame team for not doing agile right team should throw agile shaman off nearest cliff and find somebody who's not doing that job as some kind of dodge... too many self declared agile coaches and scrum masters out there who have no idea what they're doing - it usually starts because the organisation gets their first feed of them and agile through a consultancy who just tells them what they want to hear rather than they reality, and the senior management usually can't get out of that headspace.
- seadan83 4y ago
  To paraphrase: "The 3 questions now considered harmful" It wasn't until 2020 that the 3 questions were dropped from the scrum guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/going-beyond-three-questions-daily-scrum https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/going-beyond-three-ques...) Personally, I think the biggest difference is just anyone on a team who is empowered and is thinking deeply about process is the key.
agumonkey 4y ago
Sounds way too familiar. I tried to make things more pragmatic and exciting for everybody and was put down. Human nature at play.
JohnFen 4y ago
> you already know what they're going to say because you all, you know, talk Standups are a pet peeve of mine especially. If the team isn't communicating regularly, then there's a larger issue that standups won't solve. If it is, then standups are a complete waste of time.
mr_toad 4y ago
> and then also having to turn yesterday's work into some epic (LOL) tale of adventure and adversity because your manager's in the meeting I find myself going over what I’m going to say in my head so it sounds good when it gets to my turn. I then end up not paying any attention to what anyone else is saying.
- dheera 4y ago
  Yeah I wish more people would just say "I'm working on the same thing I was yesterday, no blockers, just need a few more days" and legitimize that if that's what's actually happening
whydoyoucare 4y ago
Your last statement is insightful. Thank you. The major problem facing the industry is doing agile just because everyone is doing it, not because it is the right tool for the job. No matter how much money or people you throw at it, it's not going to work.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > The major problem facing the industry is doing agile just because everyone is doing it, not because it is the right tool for the job. No matter how much money or people you throw at it, it's not going to work. I recently started a role running an Engineering org at a startup. The first two questions I asked everyone are why are they doing scrum and what do they want out of the engineering process. Answers to the first question were all over the map, and answers to the second were almost identical.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 4y ago
> Starting every day with a half-hour of that shit. Oh, you sweet summer child. I wish it was only half an hour at the start of the day.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Right? 20 people? Dog and pony show with follow up questions? This isn't a half hour meeting, this is at least an hour.
scrame 4y ago
lol, this is exactly the team I'm on that I got moved to because I hate scrum and they thought they were doing me a favor after a product focused reorg. just...hours of useless status meetings. It didn't start like that, but they overhired, and the time not in status meetings is split between a dozen slack channels. bleh.
JSavageOne 4y ago
You hit the nail on the head here. The whole standup process is extremely degrading. I don't think I'd ever work at another company that does a daily standup, the most I can take is 3x/week - and ideally as short as possible.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I suspect it depends a lot on the standup. My favorite place I worked had a great one. 10-15 minutes every morning, a brisk and helpful way to get focused, line up the help you needed, and kick off the day. I miss it deeply.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    We talk for a full hour every day, but there are only usually 5 or 6 of us, and we are all invested in every feature, so the meetings end up being a fairly detailed review and feedback on everybody work.
    - zwkrt 4y ago
      > full hour every day > invested in every feature Sounds like hell to me.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        I got pushed to a team that did this. I decided to try to extend the meetings for as long as possible with the goal of eating so much time nothing got done anyday. The daily stopped shortly after
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Interesting! Did you all find that helpful and worth the time?
  - komali2 4y ago
    Conversely, I did a project once where we had not a single stand-up in 9 months. CEO would come up with some designs, I'd asynchronously comment on them with questions or concerns, then slice the designs into tickets that'd I'd pump good amounts of context and detail into, estimate and prioritize, then chuck my engineering team at them. We'd all asynchronously work on them. If they had questions, they'd slack me. This across five timezones. Once or twice we'd have a miss on a ticket probably because I didn't define it well enough, but I'd just point out the issues in code review and they'd rewrite as needed. Oh well. Meanwhile we all have a phenomenal quality of life because our entire day schedule is set on our terms. And we delivered a whole ass SaaS product from scratch in like 9 months for around 2,500 engineering hours if my brief math is right so the founders were happy.
rhaway84773 4y ago
I’m not sure why weekly status meetings lost favor. Meet for 1hr every week as a team, and go over what everyone is working on and see how we’re progressing, and forecast where you should be by the next week. The moment a developer feels they may not be able to deliver what was expected by next week’s status meeting, they share that with the team in whatever asynchronous communication tool your team uses, whether it’s chat, email, etc. Regular problems and communications are raised in the same group chat/group email. It doesn’t matter how small the daily standup is. It could be 5 minutes. But it’s a daily context switching exercise. I think it’s far better to have a single weekly, but longer meeting, so there’s only 1 context switch in the entire week.
- nrclark 4y ago
  At most places I’ve worked, long standups turn into “watch somebody else use Jira” meetings that all participants ignore until they hear their names. Not a great use of anybody’s time.
  - hammock 4y ago
    What is supposed to happen in Good standup?
    - noisy_boy 4y ago
      "Any issues/blockers?" ... "No? ok - chat tomorrow".
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        “Good standup” also surfaces what people are working on because it might be important for the rest of the team to know for innumerable good reasons. It can serve as an opportunity for many-birds-one-stone, or even as an opportunity to interrupt work that doesn’t need to be done because it’s redundant to other efforts or because other efforts made it moot. But yeah, you won’t get that from standups where people aren’t invested in what others say they’re working on. That’s just people blabbing for a (hopefully short) ritual time.
pif 4y ago
> getting everyone to frequently think about deadline/feature trade-offs I never let anyone else impose a deadline and a list of features on my schedule. If the features are mandatory, I will provide the deadline. If the deadline cannot be missed, I will accept a sorted list of features (by priority). In both cases, I'll do my best to cram the most value possible in the next release, but the sooner I need to commit to its content, the poorer it will be. If the deadline and the list of features are both set in stone, then it's not my problem.

darreninthenet 4y ago

This is where a decent Scrum Master or Agile Coach makes such a massive difference... I've seen what you're describing so many times and it's a simple fix to get people to stop focusing on what they've done and to instead focus on what the team needs to do (ie focus on work not yet complete for the team and not what on the individual has done/will do)

marcinzm 4y ago
People care and should care about what they get rewarded for. If promotions/raises/bonuses are based on the manager's view of your personal work, as is the case at most companies, then that is exactly what a sane person should focus on. Removing the manager from the standup or adding another layer of a Scrum Master won't change that but merely change how they get that same information. Standup at least provides an equal opportunity for everyone to sell themselves in those cases.
- Pamar 4y ago
  So people with better communication skills would get rewarded more than people contributing more on the actual delivery side?
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    He's not suggesting that's how it should work, he's saying that's how it does work at most places. It's my experience too.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    As the other comment said I'm simply noting the unfortunately reality that what matters is rarely actual delivery. Trying to avoid that reality won't make things more tied to delivery but simply more opaque as to what they're tied to. There's exceptions but in my experience those teams don't bother with these types of deep discussions on process. The process is somewhat irrelevant since the expectations are fairly clear and what they will be measured on is also fairly clear.
- darreninthenet 4y ago
  If the SM is seen as or becomes a layer between the team and management, they aren't doing their job correctly
candiddevmike 4y ago
All those people do is make me disgruntled knowing it's someone's _job_ to run this bullshit circus. Automate the lot of it away, don't make it someone's career.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Good in theory In practice, any standup format where developers show up and basically perform to some standards set by a “master” or “coach” is kind of doomed to feel a little bit like a circus show. The problem is the existence of someone else running the show in these meetings. The best standup I’ve had were those run by the engineers themselves. Adding a “coach” or “master” just makes everything worse unless the team is really bad at communicating with each other, in which case you have bigger problems.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Lord knows what people are calling coaching these days. But if they're actually coaching, then yes, getting the team to run the meeting was exactly my goal when I did that kind of work. But that can be tricky. The biggest issue is to train managers to not make it about the manager. For that, an external coach is especially helpful, because it's the rare engineer who can sit their boss down and say, "Look, you're destroying this meeting. How about you not show up for the next two weeks, and then optionally show up but never speak for a month after that?" But even once you've created a space where power doesn't distort everything, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. People who talk too much or too little. People are unkind, rude, cutting, or outright mean. People who talk about the wrong things. People who don't even know what to do if there isn't a manager around to try to please. The truth is that for most people in the industry, their median meeting is bad. People with shorter careers may never have experienced a good meeting. So expecting them to just figure out how to have an excellent meeting every day is asking a lot. Especially a stand-up, which has pretty sharp constraints. If a team already knows or quickly figures it out, great. But a coach can really help.
- darreninthenet 4y ago
  This would be the goal of a decent coach, to ultimately not be needed by the team you're working with (ie they run things by themselves)
markrages 4y ago
Scrum works best if you can find a true Scotsman to be the Scrum Master.
- mech422 4y ago
  I snorted...stealing that line for future use :-) You win the interwebz for today :-D
rjh29 4y ago
> whenever agile project fail, agile shaman say "you didn't do agile right!" grug note this awfully convenient for agile shaman, ask more shiney rock better agile train young grugs on agile, danger!
- paiute 4y ago
  pure marxism has never tried! if only we try the pure version it will work better! Marx had some good idea, communism stinks. Agile manifesto has good ideas Agile stinks. Maybe not as bad, but let's move on
  - lmm 4y ago
    I've found a direct correlation that the more closely a workplace conformed to the Agile manifesto, the better it was to work in. It absolutely does work in practice, and where it doesn't work I have always found specific, actionable places where they were doing it wrong. At some point you do have to actually spend 5 minutes to try to understand and follow the methodology - I don't think there's any methodology that claims you can ignore everything it tells you, do the oppsite of what it says half the time, and it will still improve your organisation. (Unfortunately I haven't found any correlation between how much an employer talks about Agile and how closely they actually follow it)
- darreninthenet 4y ago
  I know you're being somewhat flippant but if agile shaman blame team for not doing agile right team should throw agile shaman off nearest cliff and find somebody who's not doing that job as some kind of dodge... too many self declared agile coaches and scrum masters out there who have no idea what they're doing - it usually starts because the organisation gets their first feed of them and agile through a consultancy who just tells them what they want to hear rather than they reality, and the senior management usually can't get out of that headspace.
seadan83 4y ago
To paraphrase: "The 3 questions now considered harmful" It wasn't until 2020 that the 3 questions were dropped from the scrum guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/going-beyond-three-questions-daily-scrum https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/going-beyond-three-ques...) Personally, I think the biggest difference is just anyone on a team who is empowered and is thinking deeply about process is the key.

agumonkey 4y ago

Sounds way too familiar. I tried to make things more pragmatic and exciting for everybody and was put down. Human nature at play.

JohnFen 4y ago

> you already know what they're going to say because you all, you know, talk Standups are a pet peeve of mine especially. If the team isn't communicating regularly, then there's a larger issue that standups won't solve. If it is, then standups are a complete waste of time.

mr_toad 4y ago

> and then also having to turn yesterday's work into some epic (LOL) tale of adventure and adversity because your manager's in the meeting I find myself going over what I’m going to say in my head so it sounds good when it gets to my turn. I then end up not paying any attention to what anyone else is saying.

dheera 4y ago
Yeah I wish more people would just say "I'm working on the same thing I was yesterday, no blockers, just need a few more days" and legitimize that if that's what's actually happening

whydoyoucare 4y ago

Your last statement is insightful. Thank you. The major problem facing the industry is doing agile just because everyone is doing it, not because it is the right tool for the job. No matter how much money or people you throw at it, it's not going to work.

fatnoah 4y ago
> The major problem facing the industry is doing agile just because everyone is doing it, not because it is the right tool for the job. No matter how much money or people you throw at it, it's not going to work. I recently started a role running an Engineering org at a startup. The first two questions I asked everyone are why are they doing scrum and what do they want out of the engineering process. Answers to the first question were all over the map, and answers to the second were almost identical.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 4y ago

> Starting every day with a half-hour of that shit. Oh, you sweet summer child. I wish it was only half an hour at the start of the day.

sanderjd 4y ago
Right? 20 people? Dog and pony show with follow up questions? This isn't a half hour meeting, this is at least an hour.

scrame 4y ago

lol, this is exactly the team I'm on that I got moved to because I hate scrum and they thought they were doing me a favor after a product focused reorg. just...hours of useless status meetings. It didn't start like that, but they overhired, and the time not in status meetings is split between a dozen slack channels. bleh.

JSavageOne 4y ago

You hit the nail on the head here. The whole standup process is extremely degrading. I don't think I'd ever work at another company that does a daily standup, the most I can take is 3x/week - and ideally as short as possible.

wpietri 4y ago
I suspect it depends a lot on the standup. My favorite place I worked had a great one. 10-15 minutes every morning, a brisk and helpful way to get focused, line up the help you needed, and kick off the day. I miss it deeply.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  We talk for a full hour every day, but there are only usually 5 or 6 of us, and we are all invested in every feature, so the meetings end up being a fairly detailed review and feedback on everybody work.
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    > full hour every day > invested in every feature Sounds like hell to me.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      I got pushed to a team that did this. I decided to try to extend the meetings for as long as possible with the goal of eating so much time nothing got done anyday. The daily stopped shortly after
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Interesting! Did you all find that helpful and worth the time?
- komali2 4y ago
  Conversely, I did a project once where we had not a single stand-up in 9 months. CEO would come up with some designs, I'd asynchronously comment on them with questions or concerns, then slice the designs into tickets that'd I'd pump good amounts of context and detail into, estimate and prioritize, then chuck my engineering team at them. We'd all asynchronously work on them. If they had questions, they'd slack me. This across five timezones. Once or twice we'd have a miss on a ticket probably because I didn't define it well enough, but I'd just point out the issues in code review and they'd rewrite as needed. Oh well. Meanwhile we all have a phenomenal quality of life because our entire day schedule is set on our terms. And we delivered a whole ass SaaS product from scratch in like 9 months for around 2,500 engineering hours if my brief math is right so the founders were happy.

rhaway84773 4y ago

I’m not sure why weekly status meetings lost favor. Meet for 1hr every week as a team, and go over what everyone is working on and see how we’re progressing, and forecast where you should be by the next week. The moment a developer feels they may not be able to deliver what was expected by next week’s status meeting, they share that with the team in whatever asynchronous communication tool your team uses, whether it’s chat, email, etc. Regular problems and communications are raised in the same group chat/group email. It doesn’t matter how small the daily standup is. It could be 5 minutes. But it’s a daily context switching exercise. I think it’s far better to have a single weekly, but longer meeting, so there’s only 1 context switch in the entire week.

nrclark 4y ago
At most places I’ve worked, long standups turn into “watch somebody else use Jira” meetings that all participants ignore until they hear their names. Not a great use of anybody’s time.
- hammock 4y ago
  What is supposed to happen in Good standup?
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    "Any issues/blockers?" ... "No? ok - chat tomorrow".
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      “Good standup” also surfaces what people are working on because it might be important for the rest of the team to know for innumerable good reasons. It can serve as an opportunity for many-birds-one-stone, or even as an opportunity to interrupt work that doesn’t need to be done because it’s redundant to other efforts or because other efforts made it moot. But yeah, you won’t get that from standups where people aren’t invested in what others say they’re working on. That’s just people blabbing for a (hopefully short) ritual time.

pif 4y ago

> getting everyone to frequently think about deadline/feature trade-offs I never let anyone else impose a deadline and a list of features on my schedule. If the features are mandatory, I will provide the deadline. If the deadline cannot be missed, I will accept a sorted list of features (by priority). In both cases, I'll do my best to cram the most value possible in the next release, but the sooner I need to commit to its content, the poorer it will be. If the deadline and the list of features are both set in stone, then it's not my problem.