5 ms·

Scrum, as it is practiced, is all the shitty parts of water fall without any of the work being put in on the business side. Candidly what every org is missing:

Scrum, as it is practiced, is all the shitty parts of water fall without any of the work being put in on the business side. Candidly what every org is missing: accounting. IN a very literal sense. How much time did we spend on a feature, what was the cost. How much does it cost to run the feature? How much do people use the feature? Are we gaining or loosing clients because of it? Stuff someone from accounting into every dev team and make them live and die by the numbers. A lot of features for resumes will die quick deaths.

dingosity 2y ago
Heck. I came here to make essentially the same comment. I miss the 90s when we did XP. Another complaint I have about Scrum is its structure assumes you have a good idea of what you're trying to do. Agile was supposed to reduce the cost of design changes. Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira. No one in my organization knows how to configure it because we don't want to pay to send the guy who manages it part time to training. And when we paid for the consultant, they asked all sorts of questions like 'how are your projects laid out?' and we said 'uh... we hired you to tell us how we should do that' and they said 'you need to know how your projects are laid out' and we said 'heck, batman, we don't even know what the hell we're really building because we're waaay early in the requirements gathering and design' and they said 'how cute, call me when you know what you're doing' and we said 'yeah... i think we can randomly click buttons on the Jira interface without your help' and our VP said 'we need to monetize our synergy by leveraging our learnings and develop asks for cross departmental interfaces' and i said 'absolutely, Bob, I'll just be over here writing a distributed map reduce function in Erlang' and my management chain said 'CI/CD is hard, let's just do GitFlow and hire interns to randomly type YAML files we upload to AWS' and at this time I tried to wake up but it was not a dream." Which is to say... Scrum adds structure to the things that are easy to add structure to and seems to avoid having people think about the problems. You ABSOLUTELY can do Scrum without it devolving into a crap-fest, but it's not easy and you wind up using other tools, often without telling your management chain.
- dieortin 2y ago
  > Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira When I was at Amazon my team used Scrum but didn’t use Jira. I’d imagine the other FAANG companies don’t either
  - dingosity 2y ago
    I was also at Amazon. We used a slightly modified version of scrum in that at least my team wasn't afraid to push back on ceremonies we didn't think we needed. Sprint planning? virtually always. Sometimes without the planning poker deck. Daily standups? virtually always. Retrospectives? not as often as you might think. But... was decision making authority devolved to the team, SDM or TAM? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Our code was nothing but a series of queries to config settings and simple math. And even then it took weeks to get a decision on how things should work so we could tweak the config settings used in code that was now difficult to understand. Refactoring? pish! Unit tests? who wants to test every class? (i.e. - management didn't understand what unit tests or TDD were.) My experience with Amazon was we toed the line for the easy bits of Scrum (ceremonies, etc) but the stuff that seems to matter where wildly different between teams. If someone asked me "Does Amazon use Scrum?" I would say "in theory, but not really in practice." In 2016 when we all moved to the new issue tracking system, I sort of wished we could use Jira. For most of that year my team put Todos and Issues in the GIT repo along with the code because we were tired of losing days of info in the system as they kept reverting to known good versions and losing issue tracking data (because the format of the data was dependent on new code that was just reverted.) Though I do know that parts of amazon (AWS, Studios, etc.) were able to avoid the majority of the problems. I had hoped when Andy took over the whole shebang, things would get better. But after poking my head in last month, things as the bit-A seem to have gotten a bit worse: interns and SDE II's still do all the coding (one of the reasons i left; i'm not an intern and i like coding), but no-one on the team I was called in to help still hadn't read any of the TDD books and just assumed a unit test was a test you wrote to test a single class, because a class is a unit. But let me stop bitching about a company I don't work at anymore and say I don't disagree with you but it brings up a point I should have mentioned: "Scrum" probably means different things in different teams. Big companies have a lot of teams that might all say they're doing "Scrum", but they're doing it in a very different way. Some will ignore the intangible aspects of Scrum and Agile, and only use the tools (like Jira). Others will be adamant that every ceremony must be performed at exactly the right time. Most will try to do the best they can even though product management has their heads so far up... hold on... i should be nice... i have worked with product managers that are excellent, i just wish there were more of them. Yeah. Amazon is a big place with a lot of teams. They're probably all doing a version of scrum. And they're not using Jira. So we have an existence proof that it happens with at least big companies.

dingosity 2y ago

Heck. I came here to make essentially the same comment. I miss the 90s when we did XP. Another complaint I have about Scrum is its structure assumes you have a good idea of what you're trying to do. Agile was supposed to reduce the cost of design changes. Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira. No one in my organization knows how to configure it because we don't want to pay to send the guy who manages it part time to training. And when we paid for the consultant, they asked all sorts of questions like 'how are your projects laid out?' and we said 'uh... we hired you to tell us how we should do that' and they said 'you need to know how your projects are laid out' and we said 'heck, batman, we don't even know what the hell we're really building because we're waaay early in the requirements gathering and design' and they said 'how cute, call me when you know what you're doing' and we said 'yeah... i think we can randomly click buttons on the Jira interface without your help' and our VP said 'we need to monetize our synergy by leveraging our learnings and develop asks for cross departmental interfaces' and i said 'absolutely, Bob, I'll just be over here writing a distributed map reduce function in Erlang' and my management chain said 'CI/CD is hard, let's just do GitFlow and hire interns to randomly type YAML files we upload to AWS' and at this time I tried to wake up but it was not a dream." Which is to say... Scrum adds structure to the things that are easy to add structure to and seems to avoid having people think about the problems. You ABSOLUTELY can do Scrum without it devolving into a crap-fest, but it's not easy and you wind up using other tools, often without telling your management chain.

dieortin 2y ago
> Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira When I was at Amazon my team used Scrum but didn’t use Jira. I’d imagine the other FAANG companies don’t either
- dingosity 2y ago
  I was also at Amazon. We used a slightly modified version of scrum in that at least my team wasn't afraid to push back on ceremonies we didn't think we needed. Sprint planning? virtually always. Sometimes without the planning poker deck. Daily standups? virtually always. Retrospectives? not as often as you might think. But... was decision making authority devolved to the team, SDM or TAM? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Our code was nothing but a series of queries to config settings and simple math. And even then it took weeks to get a decision on how things should work so we could tweak the config settings used in code that was now difficult to understand. Refactoring? pish! Unit tests? who wants to test every class? (i.e. - management didn't understand what unit tests or TDD were.) My experience with Amazon was we toed the line for the easy bits of Scrum (ceremonies, etc) but the stuff that seems to matter where wildly different between teams. If someone asked me "Does Amazon use Scrum?" I would say "in theory, but not really in practice." In 2016 when we all moved to the new issue tracking system, I sort of wished we could use Jira. For most of that year my team put Todos and Issues in the GIT repo along with the code because we were tired of losing days of info in the system as they kept reverting to known good versions and losing issue tracking data (because the format of the data was dependent on new code that was just reverted.) Though I do know that parts of amazon (AWS, Studios, etc.) were able to avoid the majority of the problems. I had hoped when Andy took over the whole shebang, things would get better. But after poking my head in last month, things as the bit-A seem to have gotten a bit worse: interns and SDE II's still do all the coding (one of the reasons i left; i'm not an intern and i like coding), but no-one on the team I was called in to help still hadn't read any of the TDD books and just assumed a unit test was a test you wrote to test a single class, because a class is a unit. But let me stop bitching about a company I don't work at anymore and say I don't disagree with you but it brings up a point I should have mentioned: "Scrum" probably means different things in different teams. Big companies have a lot of teams that might all say they're doing "Scrum", but they're doing it in a very different way. Some will ignore the intangible aspects of Scrum and Agile, and only use the tools (like Jira). Others will be adamant that every ceremony must be performed at exactly the right time. Most will try to do the best they can even though product management has their heads so far up... hold on... i should be nice... i have worked with product managers that are excellent, i just wish there were more of them. Yeah. Amazon is a big place with a lot of teams. They're probably all doing a version of scrum. And they're not using Jira. So we have an existence proof that it happens with at least big companies.