Comment by sklivvz1971 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sklivvz1971 | Hacker News Reader

The author deeply misunderstands Scrum. They also misspell it as SCRUM but that's another story...

Sprints are timeboxes and not deadlines. Stuff is done at a "normal" pace and it either fits (or does not) in that timebox.

Fundamentally, it does not really matter in itself. Noting down whether the estimation was correct or not, though, is important.

The whole point is that a team is supposed to get more _predictable_ over time. They learn how to estimate better, and having a fixed "box" to fill is a very easy way to do so.

So: Scrum is a "scientific" way to reach a sustainable pace ("scientific" meaning: based on objective, repeated measurements).

This is not to say that Kanban does not work. It's just way way harder to do right, because measurements of how good a team is at having a sustainable pace are not as intuitive and are easy to ignore for teams -- and ignore it they do, unless they are very well disciplined.

But all of this is well know in the world of Agile, I remember talking about this ten years ago. Perhaps an agile coach would truly help this person.

As an aside, "sprint" (which obviously implies moving at the greatest speed possible for a human on foot, pushing themselves to a point which cannot be sustained for long distances) is pretty poor terminology for something meant to represent something happening at a sustainable pace. I'm sure I'm not the first or last person to point this out, though.

When I first heard the term “sprint” I thought it was surely being used so they could later make some point like “since sprinting is of course unsustainable, we introduce weeks of relaxation between them”... Nope!

Me too. I actually proposed 3 day sprints at work Tuesday-Thursday. With Monday and Friday being for meetings and nonsense. They laughed at me like I was joking.

I like to call them "strolls" :-)

Agreed. A few places I’ve worked have tended to call them cycles, at least partly for that reason.

This is one of the reasons Scrum stopped using the word commitment in favor of forecast https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast

Most people who say they are doing Scrum or think they are doing Scrum aren't really. Scrum is far from perfect but it's better than most of the bastardizations people invent for themselves when they claim to be doing it.

At some point if most people are following your framework incorrectly it might be time to acknowledge that the framework is hard to implement correctly.

If your proposal for fixing it is for people to try harder to do it correctly then you might have a bad framework.

This nails it for me. I have seen too many scrum implementations give insufficient weight to pointing, leaving it undecided whether the pointing scale is linear or something else, pointing inconsistently across people within a team, and most importantly not accounting for when reality differs from estimates over time. IMO this leads to foregoing one of the most important benefits of doing scrum in the first place.

I really hope I'll live long enough to be in the Scrum project that's run this way. In all the companies I worked for Scrum with its sprint and daily stand-up meetings just becomes a tool for micromanaging the team.

EDIT: My own understanding of Scrum was, that you can commit to a deadline for the whole project (say, we'll have this application ready by the end of Q3), and then use sprints and backlog prioritization to manipulate the project scope. So, when you hit the deadline you always have ready to use product, just maybe with less functionality than intended.

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