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Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

My team doesn't do sprints and honestly thank god. HN is pretty "product eng" focused and sprints do work better there... but for infra projects where the units of work often tend to involve more R&D, exploration, etc. I've found that weekly check-ins work best (scheduling ad-hoc sync when needed). You still get the benefit of a heads-up on what people are working on but you're not trying to shove tasks into arbitrary 2-3 week sprints.

At the end of the day, "agile" wasn't originally the monstrosity that scrum-fetishists have turned it into. It was simply these few lines:

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan"

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"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"

It is precisely at this beginning point where most "Agile" teams fall flat on their faces. Instead, it is all about process, rather than said individuals/interactions. Scrum rituals are done because, well, everyone else does them, so that's considered "correct". Whether or not there is any value in the process is secondary.

It's also the motivation from management to build process. Rather than agile being a toolbox you pull from because it's helpful, it becomes a suite of metrics that managers and executives can track. Thus everyone must use the full toolbox because their benefit is overruled by management's benefit.

My company's leadership does not acknowledge or care about value delivered locally; it is all about cross-team collaboration. (If you get something done locally in 6 weeks, you wasted your time, while if you involve 4 other orgs so that it takes 30 weeks, everyone involved gets promoted).

It seems local variations in development processes as the #1 blocker to more cross-team collaboration, so it is enthusiastically steamrolling them.

1000% this! The key takeaway of Agile that a lot of people lose sight of, is that you should be doing whatever works for your team, not whatever you did at a previous company or read from a trendy blog post. By all means - try out anything you think will work for your team.

If you're trying to plan out which individual stories your eng team will be working on 6 months from now, or you have a half-dozen "Sprint Retrospectives" with the same complaints every sprint from your team with no changes being made - you've probably made a wrong turn somewhere.

Unfortunately "agile" is one of those lovely sounding ideas that were never going to survive contact with the real world of company politics and management. Perhaps in some places, in some small agencies and startups with strong tech-focused leadership it might yield some successes for a short time, until they start growing and hiring from the bigger companies. Then you end up with the same-old-same-old with more meetings and Jira.

Sprints that don't ship something (i.e. "deliver user value") are just arbitrary timeboxes. They probably can just be progress checkins without all the overhead of Scrum ceremony.

Arbitrary time boxes are what poor managers use to micro manage. I recently saw a team put under leadership of a poor manager and descend into never ending micro management under the guise of "milestones" which were just arbitrary time boxes determined by a tech lead. It also serves to pressure the tech lead "you said it would be done!" which thereby incentivizes the tech leads to pressure their team. It's really dumb, net loss for the company (burnout, higher turnover), and a total waste of time.

Oh man this describes my position to a T as the lead. Manager demands a date which forces me to push my team which they hate. Sigh.

Thanks side another perspective on infra teams. We do Agile and it's such a time waster for us. We spend 5 hours a week on ceremonies that could be condensed to two half hour meetings.

I've always wondered, how did it come to this? isn't having a standup every day a 'process'?

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