Comment by legitster
2 years ago
This is wonderful description of the kind of hellhole corporate Scrum is turning into.
Agile was literally about doing things quickly and quick cycles of capability improvement. But Scrum is a worse version of the planning processes it meant to replace!
If anything, the way scrum lays out the work into immediate problems exacerbates the cycle. In the long run it just turns into a ticketing system where fires get pushed up and technical debt gets pushed down.
It even spits out a super easy-to-track, meaningless set of efficiency numbers for consultants/executives to min-max!
> Scrum is a worse version of the planning processes it meant to replace!
You say this as if it was a coincidence.
I'm allowed to say such things. Some of my best friends are scrum masters.
I still can't believe a scrum master is an actual FT job - last company I worked for had one FT scrum master for each project - so they ran the meetings and as far as I can tell, did nothing else - what the heck do they pretend to do for the rest of the week?
I went to all the same meetings, and was still supposed to actually develop software in between them all.
Agile seems to have ended up as a way for PMs to report upward to senior managers who also need to report upward.
You can see why. These people have to decide what will be worked on out of all the potential things that can be worked on. Someone has to make that decision. Will this feature make us money? What about that bit of work that doesn't add a feature but reduces resource costs? What about tech debt that I'm told is building up and slowing the ability to deliver features?
I'm not a senior manager, but ultimately someone up the chain is responsible for the company surviving and making money and paying our salaries. They are just like you and I, trying to make decisions based on what little information that can glean. So part of that is "what will this cost and how much will it be worth" vs "what will that other thing cost and how much will it be worth".
To that end, they need some way to estimate this. They latched on to agile as it was being promoted by tech as a way to do this. Whose fault is that?
And so with that came all the frequent estimations, are we on track, rituals, etc. Some people don't believe this should naturally follow. I agree. But somehow all those rituals have become part of the cult.
We abondanded scrum. We abandoned refinements and estimation of stories and story points etc. Now we meet with a PM once a month formally and as a team perform a t-shirt size estimate on where we are. Otherwise we update her as frequently as she asks (which isn't often) or we want. This gives power to us but because of that we're conscientious and make sure to inform her timeously when things are looking sketchy or whatever. Yes, we still have to give "estimates", because ultimately, senior management want to make decisions, but it is otherwise quite lightweight.
It is so liberating.
I found the idea Scrum being efficient when done right was true at one company I worked at. Everyone was committed to the process, the Scrum team included debt as a priority for 20% of the effort and everyone had a fairly accurate velocity that we could bake in an additional 20% of your work as your own interests, so stakeholder priorities filled that remaining 60%. Then we would pivot in some Sprints if any epic/team goals required a push to get done or other emergencies/bugs that required a change in priority.
I don't think it can't be done right, but it's been cargo-culted pretty hard at Fortune 500 companies. But the best scrums I have ever done have just been literally post-it notes on a whiteboard - I think Jira ads a level of complexity that is unsustainable for most orgs.
In my 17 years in the industry I saw working agile twice. Both were small places, both used post-it notes. Both were consultancies, each team dedicated to an independent project.
Everything else, world-class, public, private, consultants or not... was a joke.
I don't think cross-team collaboration works in agile. Either one plans ahead, or everything becomes an unpredictable mess.
1 reply →
I've found it works better when you "build up" to Scrum by incrementally adding processes when you identify issues and relaxing the process if things are working well.
Adding a bunch of processes because you want to add processes doesn't provide value.
> Scrum
I always thought this just meant to scrumble every week to get things done with a weekly standup?
I believe it's actually a rugby term, and the idea is to wrestle things across the line at a regular cadence as a team.
The unit of work is even called a sprint because the idea is specifically to commit to very intense units of work.
Some managers tell their teams that they need to be more agile, I guess when referee yells "scrumble!" everyone sprints with a lot of agility.
I'm an engineer type, most of this makes very little sense to me.
I would call it "the hellhole that corporate performance assessment is turning into". Scrum is just a tool