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Highly efficient teams arrive at ~scrum naturally, without having to label it. You start with a highly efficient team, and scrum follows. Not the other way aro

by lijok 3y ago

Highly efficient teams arrive at ~scrum naturally, without having to label it. You start with a highly efficient team, and scrum follows. Not the other way around. If you've got a team of individuals that do not naturally want to meet every once in a while to discuss progress and potential efficiency wins, you've got an incompatible team and should rebuild, not force them to have those meetings.

ekidd 3y ago
My unfortunate personal experience with various teams is that Scrum is too often an excellent way to close tickets if you don't care very much about quality. The whole dynamic of fixed-length iterations and "commitment ceremonies" puts heavy social pressure on developers to hit lots of tiny deadlines. And when minor estimation errors occur, there's a risk of developers shipping code that technically meets requirements, but which subtly compromises quality or maintainability. But hey, they kept their promises! And then you hold retrospectives where you try to find out why production is a dumpster fire and the clients are unhappy. Even skilled software estimators may be off by 50% on individual features. Over time, this mostly averages out. But chopping time up too finely and applying social pressure to consistently hit lots of micro-deadlines has to be paid for somewhere. I am personally a fan of Kanban: Keep a priority queue of features. Estimate them as best you can. Allow decision makers to reorder the queue as they learn about customers. This still gives you rough estimates, and the ability to track estimation accuracy. But it doesn't back team members into a corner where they feel pressured to ship two days to soon just because it's the end of the iteration.
fjfaase 3y ago
Formal and/or scheduled meetings are not the only and often not the most effective way of communication between team members. Highly effective teams often have a lot of informal interactions between team members by various means of communication not restricted to one-on-one talks or small group meetings before white boards. I know many introvert developers that rather write a detailed comment on an issue raising some discussion points than have a discussion on the subject. In a highly effective team, the team members know the strong and weaknesses of fellow team member and are often able to arrange things without having to rely on regular scheduled meetings and/or stand-ups.

by lijok 3y ago

ekidd 3y ago

My unfortunate personal experience with various teams is that Scrum is too often an excellent way to close tickets if you don't care very much about quality. The whole dynamic of fixed-length iterations and "commitment ceremonies" puts heavy social pressure on developers to hit lots of tiny deadlines. And when minor estimation errors occur, there's a risk of developers shipping code that technically meets requirements, but which subtly compromises quality or maintainability. But hey, they kept their promises! And then you hold retrospectives where you try to find out why production is a dumpster fire and the clients are unhappy. Even skilled software estimators may be off by 50% on individual features. Over time, this mostly averages out. But chopping time up too finely and applying social pressure to consistently hit lots of micro-deadlines has to be paid for somewhere. I am personally a fan of Kanban: Keep a priority queue of features. Estimate them as best you can. Allow decision makers to reorder the queue as they learn about customers. This still gives you rough estimates, and the ability to track estimation accuracy. But it doesn't back team members into a corner where they feel pressured to ship two days to soon just because it's the end of the iteration.

fjfaase 3y ago

Formal and/or scheduled meetings are not the only and often not the most effective way of communication between team members. Highly effective teams often have a lot of informal interactions between team members by various means of communication not restricted to one-on-one talks or small group meetings before white boards. I know many introvert developers that rather write a detailed comment on an issue raising some discussion points than have a discussion on the subject. In a highly effective team, the team members know the strong and weaknesses of fellow team member and are often able to arrange things without having to rely on regular scheduled meetings and/or stand-ups.