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Comment by odshoifsdhfs | Hacker News Reader

I think you need to separate Agile from Scrum to be honest.

Agile is at is core just some suggestions for teams to work well together. There are no stand ups or sprints or whatever.

Scrum was created by one of the creators of the agile manifesto as a way to see consulting/training around the 'Agile' idea (timeframes may differ a bit, but they were linked). There is an interview/article by one of the creators of the agile manifesto (Kent Beck maybe?, will try to dig it up and edit the answer if I find -> was Robert C. Martin, see below) where he explains a bit the story and compares it to Agile (and basically says scrum has nothing to do with the original agile manifesto)

On a personal level, I hate scrum. The stand ups, the sprints, the retros or grooming or whatever they have nowadays. It is literally one of the first questions I ask in an interview about their processes and excuse myself from the process if I see if they follow it. It may work for others, but for me personally, I hate it with a fervour.

Though I agree with the Agile manifesto though, unfortunately it isn't very 'manager' friendly so you usually get scrum instead.

Edit: link to a reference to the article, can't find the original but found this: https://www.aaron-gray.com/a-criticism-of-scrum/#scrum-strai...

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I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies, taking the time to talk through what could be improved etc.

Stand-ups tend to be too much of a status report to the manager and are more valuable when its the developers talking between themselves and sharing knowledge of their work.

My biggest dislike for Scrum is how managers can use it to turn "agile" into basically a MS Project plan from the estimates.

> are more valuable when its the developers talking between themselves and sharing knowledge of their work

This is the biggest lie of standups. No one gives a shit about standups. Everyone is waiting for their turn and then not listening to others. Let's stop pretending. If they need help, they'll reach out to the expert on 1:1 basis. Way more productive, way more concise, better bonds, privacy and learning experience.

No one waits until standup and be like "Gee.. I should ask this help in front of 8 others and waste everyone's time".

This is completely false for the majority of places I've worked. Plenty of people don't notice how much they've got stuck, or don't know who the right expert is, or feel self-conscious about interrupting them to ask a question. Having a daily scheduled time where all the experts are available and everyone should check whether they're getting bogged down is a big help.

I've experienced the kind of "standup" you describe too, but it usually coincided with not actually following the rules for what a standup is (e.g. not actually standing up) and a bunch of other fake agile.

Huh? How are people not contacting the experts or reaching out for help? Seems fundamental to being a professional, doesn’t matter what profession.

That seems like a bad culture more than anything else.

Most developers are introverts, everyone has their own pride, and a lot of the time the difference between a getting stuck because you're missing something and getting stuck because what you're doing is just genuinely hard is not at all obvious - especially when you're in the tunnel-vision of trying to solve the problem and in a workplace where you've deliberately eliminated distractions and interruptions (which is a very good thing on the whole, but comes with its own costs).

I empathize with devs that are introverts. They'd rather not be in the stand up in the first place.

Well that is something they will need help in learning to overcome software is a team endeavour.

Stop conflating introversion with whether or not somebody is a 'team player'.

Did I say "team player"

What?

How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are?

If anything those are the exact traits that make devs prefer 1-on-1 communication.

How else to learn humble, team-oriented, potentially uncomfortable honesty but regular practice?

Psychological safety is the biggest factor in overal team performance and morale. That safety comes from trust, and that trust comes from routine demonstration of vulnerability and support.

Lone wolf rockstars can have their own moments of self-defeat and wheelspinning too. But if they haven’t developed a sense of courage and humility to admit it and bring it to the team, then the whole team is now literally bottlenecked on their ego.

It’s a nice story about rockstars: when the mythical 10x engineer gets stuck, PMs fucking PANIC.

Lul, you are over-estimating managers capabilities to differentiate a 10x developer from a 0.1x developer.

>That safety comes from trust, and that trust comes from routine demonstration of vulnerability and support

That's my intuition about what's wrong with these ceremonies: they look like they are trying to foster those things by enforcing the superficial behaviours seen in good teams, but it is just the effect. A team with trust, close bonded and efficient has "standups" and "retros" in an organic way, because that's the effect of a team that work together.

I always felt these methodologies try to turn it around, as in "let's force the superficial behaviours we see in good teams, so it will make other teams as good". But it doesn't work that way and it ends up being a tool for managers.

> How is the best situation for a prideful introvert to have a scheduled meeting every morning where they can make it known to the entire team exactly how stuck they are?

Because the whole team's doing it, because it creates a space where it's ok to have got stuck, and because the once-a-day schedule sets a clear expectation about how long it's ok to be stuck for without at least considering asking for help.

If you were happy getting yourself unstuck asking for help 1-on-1 you can still do that, and you'll never be stuck when it comes to the standup, so it should be no skin off your nose. The standup is for the sake of the people who would previously be stuck quietly for days at a time.

(though if I'm on the receiving end, I'd prefer to nudge you towards asking in standup or at least in an async way, rather than interrupting my own flow by asking me for help)

I've worked in a range of different cultures, and you're exactly right. It's "bad culture", it's people who are oriented towards individual competition rather than collaboration. It's when your SME's tear down others for not finding their specialized knowledge as "obvious". It's where the pervasive attitude is anti-documentation, anti-code comments ("if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read") - It's when members are not attuned to the possibility that others lack context because they're in a narrow role without exposure to what the broader team is doing. But mostly, it's just people being assholes.

Being "stuck" working in a company like that really sucks. You can spend years spinning your wheels just trying to keep up. Working at a company that fosters collaboration and non-judmental attitudes. . . it's like night and day, and you can grow your skills and get out of a narrow role, and look at the big picture.

These are the kinds of things that every engineer needs to learn to look for when you're doing an interview somewhere.

I consider my job very uninteresting, utterly useless and it really sucks but not because of assholes - thank god.

I understand your take, thanks for the contrast.

Sometimes you spend all day banging your head against the wall and just forget. The stand up gives you space and a reminder to tell other people you’re stuck.

Ego, experts having no time on their calendar etc. I found that daily scrum created better communication in our team, where there was none before.

Except this is completely anti thetical to the idea of stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship.

What you’re really looking for is office hours.

If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert?

And how often do people have questions for experts? More often during the beginning of a project, then there’s a lull, then maybe some more questions as you find things you hadn’t thought of, then another lull, and then more questions towards the end where you are trying to close all the loose ends.

Daily standup requires you take up the expert’s valuable time in equal amounts during all those periods. And you have a bunch of people listening in who have no reason to be in that conversation. (A single 15 minute standup with a team of 8 is straight up 2 hours down the drain. And that does not include any of the context switching costs, or the cost of interrupting someone doing deep work).

Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week.

Then another 30 minute follow up a week later and a 1 hour meeting a week later close to the end of the project.

That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.

You're not asking 'the expert', you're asking everyone in the team.

'The expert' may turn out to be the junior you just hired.

It's also about flagging issues. Sometimes 'This is not working' is not synonymous with '...because I haven't figured out how to do it.'

It can also mean 'This is actually broken' and the team hasn't realised.

That's a great point. And here is a real example that happened recently at work. One of my teams needs to create the ability for their low-level code to be able to respond to HTTP requests for command and control. So they have all immediately started trying to figure out how to do this. Except I happen to know that another of my teams already did this exact same thing in another project, packaged it up and published it...and the source code is already sitting there on github waiting to be re-used. There is zero overlap between the two teams (two totally different departments) except for me, so in this case I (as a lowly engineering manager whose coding days are long behind me) am able to solve a problem and save time/wasted effort Now, if we didn't do dailies, of course this would come up at some point but we'd have lost a week of productivity or more.

> stand ups which are supposed to be peer to peer as opposed to a more expert to non expert relationship.

Right - I'm taking the assumption that everyone will have their own area of expertise, and "the expert" for a given issue might be any one of your peers.

> If you’re self conscious about asking questions, how is it easier to do it in the moment with your entire team also listening in, as opposed to a direct IM, or email if you’re worried about disturbing the busy expert?

Because there's a specific time at which you're expected to do it. It's very easy to keep putting off an IM/email, thinking you'll just spend a bit more time trying to figure it out yourself first. And the expert has already been disturbed, so there's no need to feel guilty about interrupting them.

> Wouldn’t it be much bette to setup a 1 hour meeting on day 1 of the project with the expert (doesn’t stand up add a whole role, scrum master, whose only purpose is to direct people to the correct experts, basically? Well, use them if you don’t know who the expert is...prior to scrum we simply went to our team lead for situations like that). A 30 minute follow up at the end of the week.

No, having experienced both approaches. You're so much more productive if you have direct, daily access to the expert. On day 1 you don't know what questions to ask; most of what a programmer spends their time doing is exploring the problem space. If you've got a daily iteration cycle where you ask a couple of questions, try things out, and then come back the next day with some follow ups based on what you've learnt, you get a whole lot more done.

> That’s 3 hours worth of time from the expert in a span of 3 weeks, but the expert gets to hold forth for those entire 3 hours, without having to waste 12 out of 15 mins listening to useless crap. That’s a straight up 20% saving over the stand ups, gets you a full 3 hours from them, as opposed to 20% of the time, gets their attention in decent chunks of times, where you can have a real discussion, interrupts them 4 times over 15 working days as opposed to 15 times, and only includes those who are directly relevant to the discussion as opposed to everybody.

It doesn't end up being "useless crap"; everyone is part of the same team delivering the same product, so it's important to have cross-pollination about what's everyone else is doing.

Of course if someone has particular expertise that warrants holding forth for an hour on the subject, it might be worth scheduling a time for them to do that. But there's definitely no substitute for having everyone available every day, at the same time as the rest of the team.

> It doesn't end up being "useless crap"; everyone is part of the same team delivering the same product, so it's important to have cross-pollination about what's everyone else is doing.

And in the same breath, it is a pipe dream to believe this can be achieved in 15-30 minutes every day. That's part of the controversy behind daily scrum: as a status update tool (which, yes I know, it "isn't supposed to be"), it is too long and there are better methods which can be automated. As a tool to actually share things, it is far too short. In both cases, it is incredibly disruptive and goes against most existing theories on flow and productivity. Planning an hour session later is a mitigation tool, though it is arguably an extremely poor one.

>But there's definitely no substitute for having everyone available every day, at the same time as the rest of the team.

And you know that based on an experiment which has been going on in an extremely informal manner for 20 years? Remote work was deemed "impossible" and "no substitute for real work", but many of us seem to do just fine. Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.

> goes against most existing theories on flow and productivity

There's no contradiction; the whole premise is that those are measuring the wrong thing, that the cost of misalignment and building useless things dominates those concerns. That matches my experience.

> Let's not count our chickens before they hatch.

Look, if you've got some magic way to make things work then great. But an hour at the start, thirty minutes each week, and an hour at the end, is absolutely no substitute for having someone in your daily standup; I've done both (or pretty close to it) and it's night and day.

This is the truth.

That's where the retrospectives are good again, having that time every 2 or 3 weeks to ask questions like "Are we getting any value from the stand-ups?" Then could try not having stand-ups for a sprint, or indefinitely, and see if they're missed or not. Or try not having the project manager present at them for a sprint.

If a team has a good culture around knowledge sharing etc then quite possibly its not required, while for other teams that short time all together is better than nothing.

In what percent of real-world scrum situations do you think the team has control over their own processes?

The entire idea of "standups" is one most people get wrong about scrum. There is no such concept as a standup in scrum, but rather, it's called the Daily Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum

> The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.

The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a place to ask the "3 questions", it's a planning meeting, plain and simple. You don't have to walk the board and not everyone needs to take a turn saying what they're up to. It's a communication tool that provides an opportunity to inspect and adapt. The structure of it is totally up to the team.

Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan?

If I am blocked, I don't need the rest of the team. I will fire an email or document and tag people on Github that its blocked.

Also, why are emails not a thing anymore? Email is amazing. Apparently, its old fashioned now. Whatever is happening in tech companies, we need to stop and evaluate what the hell are we doing. It would be a great experiment (I think Gumroad is doing it? I don't remember) where there are no meetings, no slack, and only email, adhoc 1:1s.

I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.

> Seems overkill since plan is to execute the plan we discussed in the sprint. So, why do we need to remind everyone daily that we're just following the plan?

It's the question whether we can adjust "things" to be able to reach the sprint goal. It's the goal that counts, not the way imho.

> Also, why are emails not a thing anymore?

Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language. That's one of the reasons I use emojis even in emails. The ascii-ones, but still...

> I feel like we're not talking about the elephant in the room here and finding ways to justify stand ups or scrum or whatever.

Well, I can see the elephant. But people have different opinions on this topic - something you need to accept.

> Emails have their Pro's & Con's - I prefer them, but not everyone is able to be precise and on-point in written language. Also, you need to be able to express your feelings in written language.

This is exactly the opposite of what professionals do. They should be able to write well. It is not optional, it is an expectation. Feelings should not be part of a technical discussion.

In a few years, we're gonna get emojis in an RFC. Just wait, you!

> Feelings should not be part of a technical discussion.

Looks like we need to agree to disagree here.

;)

Which implies that at least one of you is dishonest or irrational or too lazy to continue the debate. ;)

See: Are Disagreements Honest? by Tyler Cowen & Robin Hanson, 2002

Interesting paper. I guess the biggest problem here lies in the fact that there can only be so much truth seeking. So, with more time and effort, we could come to a conclusion that suits both. But... I don't have that time, to be honest. ;)

The “3 questions” are alluded to in the text you linked (emphasis mine):

>The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work. This creates focus and improves self-management.

> Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings.

While I agree with your point that the format is flexible, asking the questions is a good way to keep people on topic.

For sure, I agree that if your team finds the 3 questions helpful then definitely do it. I was just trying to remind people that they're not mandated. People like to scream about how annoying "standups" are how going around the room asking everyone the 3 questions is a waste of time and for many teams that is probably true, in which case, change the format to something that is useful.

I've been in a team that didn't let people talk in turns, but instead quickly went through all the unfinished tickets and asked if they were still going well. That worked better.

I partially agree but have found it useful to just air my thoughts briefly as there is not always an obvious expert for every subject

"I am not sure about the best way to proceed..." Or "I think I am going to try X not Y..." Or "I got some weird error I don't understand so I am going to be trying to work that out today..."

Often someone will pipe up and say they've had some experience there or faced same issue before and let's talk after the standup or they have a fix in the pipeline for that so don't worry about it until next Tuesday etc etc.

I guess if your colleagues don't listen in meetings though you have a different problem.

I personally find that standups that focus on the outstanding tickets help me to focus on actually working on the tickets themselves :) rather than getting distracted onnbusy work or investigating some curious bug or refactoring something if I have to standup the next day and say "I did nothing on those tickets assigned to me".

But why would you wait to ask until the next day, at a fixed time?

You're looking at this from the long angle. Of course you shouldn't wait.

However, many people, without explicit prompting, will in fact never ask these types of questions at all. That is the value of the daily stand-up: it ensures that everyone is prompted to as these things AT LEAST once every day, rather than holding onto them for who knows how long.

I'd also note that, without dailys, it's rather rare to have the entire team together in the same room, especially now with Covid. Ideally you'd ask this type of thing on email or slack, but lots of people just don't bother unless you give them this explicit time for it.

Is there another way to achieve this objective without a daily standup?

Possibly yes, though I don't know of one which isn't more draconic (e.g. end of day reports) or manipulative (e.g. forcing the team to have coffee/lunch together every day). My point was that dailys are a real solution to a real problem, not that they are utterly indispensable and irreplaceable.

I don't see how a stand up helps. If a person doesn't have the good sense to ask on Slack/room 'Hey, does anyone know how to render a Bezier Curve in OpenGL' (or whatever) and needs to wait 24 hours to do it in a group setting, then it is a problem of communication with that person/team. Now because some people have this problem, the rest of the team has to be interrupted, do a little song and dance ritual and waste their time (and probably lose focus on what they were doing).

I'm sorry, I just can't see it. If people don't bother to do what they are paid to do, then have a chat with them/fire them in the worst case and let the people that act professional and grown ups work in peace.

Firing someone for not asking enough questions seems extreme.

The way I've seen this happen is that someone is assigned a task to render Bezier Curves in OpenGL, they work on it for a few days stumbling through, and 5 days later when they are done with the task that was assigned to them, they try to commit and find out that someone else had been given a task to remove all curves from the display and replace them with octogon segments or whatever.

With a daily scrum, they would say "I'm working on the Bezier Curves feature today" and someone else would be able to quickly tell them there's a problem with that.

In some teams, this kind of communication happens naturally all the time, but in others, people get focused on their own tasks and avoid it, either not paying attention to group chatter or simply not sending out wild questions. 15-30 minutes of lost focus for everyone everyday is really not that big a cost to pay to ensure this happens early. With any luck, a tight knit team would anyway spend that long on coffee together every day, so the daily just formalizes some informal process which already existed - no extra cost.

I didn't mean to suggest firing them if they don't ask questions per se. But lets imagine there is no daily scrum for whatever reason, people are working on their own things, if they don't ask for help and get stuck for 5 days in something without saying a word, I would have a chat with the person asap. If this continued, then yes, probably fire them as they aren't working.

And with the octagon example, there should be some kind of ticket for Bezier Curves and Octogons, if they cancel each other out, who in the hell created those tickets/decided on them? And again, you don't need a daily stand up to have an idea of who is working on what. The ticket board/tracker should give you a good idea if someone is doing Bezier Curves and you pick Octogons.

> 15-30 minutes of lost focus for everyone everyday is really not that big a cost to pay to ensure this happens early.

The problem it isn't 15-30 minutes. It is much more, because unless you are managing with strict work hours, and can make sure the stand up isn't delayed or interrupts someone's work, you are losing a lot more of the developers time. Context and focus is lost if you were in the middle of a task. Time is lost getting back to the place where you were, etc.

It may help with 'bad teams', but if the punishment for good teams is to do that because of the others, then I am sorry, I'm out. Makes no sense.

If it works for you and your team, more power to you. But not for me. (And I would really advise folks to try and understand if the team actually feels stand ups (or any other thing really) are a positive for the people involved, or they are just to 'scared' to raise concerns to not be that guy, as I have seen this happen a lot, going with the flow, but the moment they can speak freely, raise all concerns)

I admit I often don’t pay attention during standup. But I definitely do save non-urgent questions for standup vs. interrupting team members (and myself) from whatever they are working on.

Let’s say you have a stand up that is developer only and has only 5 developers. Well within the 2 pizza box limit and really how much smaller can a team get.

A standup where developers are sharing what they are working on and people are actually paying attention means that as a developer I have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions in the span of 15 mins.

The context switching and mental energy required to do that is tremendous especially when you may already be in the midst of working on your own complicated and mentally taxing project.

And this is the best case scenario. Throw in larger teams, throw in non devs, etc and it only gets exponentially more complicated from there.

The whole idea behind daily stand ups is broken.

What you want, at most, is a 1-2 per week regular status update, at the end of the day, when you’re already mentally tired so the time wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere, and good enough team relation building that you can approach each other directly when you need something.

Agile/scrum tries to replace team building with status updates. When in reality, what one needs is team members to get familiar enough with each other so they know that Jack really gets the post lunch slowdown, so after lunch is probably the best time to approach him because he may not be actively working on anything, while Jill likes to sort out all her emails and communications first thing in the morning and then focus on her work in long uninterrupted stretches, so that’s when I should reach out to her for questions/discussions.

And you need to build the ability in your teammates to be able to think about the bigger picture, and decide whether the question they need answered by Jill right now while she is in the middle of her deep work is really urgent and important enough that it warrants breaking her flow or not, or if it can wait till the next day or if it’s short and simple enough, till you guys get lunch together today.

The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process. And the Big Lie is pushed (with the best intentions) because team building cannot be packaged and sold as a 3 day workshop (well, it is, but that comes across as inauthentic and doesn’t usually work well, and team retreats have lost the majority of their flavor because honestly I don’t want to get to know the vast majority of my colleagues outside of our work lives). What it comes down to is good leadership to build a strong team culture, and that’s harder to find and develop.

So instead of making the effort and learning to accept that you will have failures where the wrong person is made team leader, or they were made team leader too early and building feedback mechanisms to identify such mistakes and hopefully correct them ASAP, we resort tom3 day workshops that teach agile and that you can replace culture with regular stand up meetings.

> The Big Lie is that team building can be replaced by process.

This! They try to do it backwards: instead of building the team that will organically end up having standups over coffee in the morning, forcing the behaviour in the hopes that will build the team.

> have to pay attention to 4 different technical discussions

Seems like a mistake to have actual technical discussions in a stand-up. So yesterday I've worked on X feature, I've gotten pretty far but I'm being blocked because of a dependency on Y feature. I'd like to continue today, developer Z (who is working on Y feature) can we discuss this after the stand-up? Of course, I could've communicated this before - and maybe I've already done that, but the rest of the team doesn't know. What if they want to pick up a new story that has a dependency as well. Should all this communication just happen in emails or slack messages? That's fine I guess but it doesn't hurt to have 15 minutes to get a good view of what the rest of the team is doing.

Once you get into the nitty gritty you should honestly just say hey let's take a subset of this group and discuss it after. Works for us. Non-dev people shouldn't be there, or at least shouldn't get turns unless they're actually working on issues in the sprint.

The biggest value is not asking for help, it's about synchronizing work.

Hey guys, in order to complete this library upgrade task today i need to do a major refactoring in common.js, so if you all could avoid tasks in this area until tomorrow so we all can avoid nasty merge conflicts it would be great, thanks.

Or hey, looks like this this test case from nightly is failing? Did anyone change something here recently? Who will take a look at it?

If your standups don't sound like this and only becomes a place to report status and excuses for being stuck (asking for help) to your PO or scrum master, then you have a lot to work on. Unfortunately the later version is very common and often hard to get out of.

> ceremonies

That has always sounded super pretentious to me. It's a damn meeting, not a wedding or a funeral.

"Ceremony," back in the day, was used to imply a certain stodginess, as in a "high ceremony process."

Agile seems very ceremonious to me.

It was a self-conscious joke, at least originally. Like "we're aware this looks like a useless waste of time".

People seem to use it in all earnestness.

I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros. It is really hard to do a good retro, and ideally no one from management should be present for at least half of it. Making a space where people feel comfortable airing grievances and feel supported can really smooth out a lot of friction. Bonus points when common pain points are made known so tooling and process can be identified to make everyone’s job easier too.

> I will second retros. I have seen team cohesion go up and down based on the quality of the retros.

Could it be the other way? That the quality of the retros went up and down based on the team cohesion? If that's the case (and I believe it is most of the times, in my experience), the retros are just an artifact, not the real mechanism.

There’s a lot to this, bad moral lead to bad retros. But I’ve seen a team with very high cohesion shut down completely when a particularly toxic manager was present in a single retro. It was very illuminating to watch. When no one feels safe to talk in a retro that’s going to bleed into the rest of the interactions at the company. And while the reverse is true too, it can be set up to be slightly assymmetrical. If you can make a safe space for the group somewhere even if it’s only an hour twice a month it can really help alleviate toxicity elsewhere. It’s not a magic bullet, and honestly I don’t know how repeatable what I’ve experienced is. We had a really good facilitator on loan from another team at one point, and I’m not sure we could have kicked off some of our changes without this person.

> I've found the retrospectives to be the most valuable part of the scrum ceremonies

Sprints are just the periods of time between retros.

I've found the opposite. Retrospectives consist of a bunch of bland statements with any actionable items getting discarded immediately after.

It doesn't help that few people take it seriously. And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting, ruining any chance of it working for the rest.

No offense but it seems like you're part of the problem then. I've also had retrospectives where bland statements were the norm but as a team you should be able to say to each other, alright nice that the teamwork was great but is there anything new?

> any actionable items getting discarded immediately after

Except that, that's bad and honestly I've never experienced it that way. Maybe because I'm vocal and harp on about things if they don't change but yeah. An actionable item either becomes an email (which we will follow up on during the sprint, if nothing happens it comes back next retro) or an issue in a sprint / kanban board.

> And there's always one or two people that talk out the entire meeting

You've got to claim a stage here. Or if it doesn't pertain to you specifically, help teammates who do get snowed under by explicitly asking them.

I'd really not want to work in the environment you're describing, but I think I'd give it a shot to change it before leaving.

The biggest improvement we made to our dailies was to break up the traditional three question structure. Nobody really cares about your status from yesterday. Especially since we work together every day and are a self-organizing team that does not need to report to a manager on a daily basis.

Instead we talk about our plans for the day, ask a lot of questions and plan our collaboration and problem solving sessions. These dailies are usually shorter and I feel like I get much more value from them.

The ‘correct form’ for the stand up is tricky, and probably varies on team size. For a small team (e.g. 4 devs) you probably care a lot about what the others are doing as you’ll likely be interacting with it closely (reviewing it, building on it), sometimes larger teams (e.g. 7 devs) then it might never come your way.

I’ve found that people who stick to the classic “what I did yesterday, what I’m doing today, what blockers are there” set tend to provide really short ‘bland’ updates e.g. “I was working on task foo, I’ll be doing more on foo today and possibly starting work on bar, I don’t have any blockers”. If you’re not paying attention you can miss the fact that the same update has been reported for 3 days in a row and actually there is some unexpected complexity and/or a simpler solution has been missed.

For me, the best stand ups give a little more information and can be a trigger for a follow up chat after the standup. “Yesterday I was working on task foo, today I’ll be doing a bit more because I found doing XXX is a little trickier than expected - but I’m still hoping to get onto bar, no blockers - unless my idea for XXX doesn’t work”

I’ve also found this sort of issue made worse on projects where the Project Management have decided that we shall be “Agile” and do scrum. You then end up with a non-technical PM acting as the scrum master and mandated “best practice”. This always stifles any technical discussion as it is ‘noise’ to them, despite being ‘signal’ for technical folk....

IME the first thing to go out of the window in any company of any reasonable size are retrospectives. Especially when they start to suggest change.

At best you get the chance of feedback with nothing implemented out of it.

>Stand-ups tend to be too much of a status report to the manager

Why is your manager present at the stand-up? It's just for the developers.

Then you've got lucky, last retro I went.... Managers were present, tech lead sucking leaking asses with their wide ears opened, and best devs leaving to better horizons.

Scrum is basically warmed-up Taylorism[1] for the 21st century, couched in buzzwords like "sprints" and "retros". It's an attempt to make software development an industrial process, stripping developers of autonomy and creativity in return for predictability. Certain managers like it because it generates metrics, even though the metrics are meaningless drivel("we completed 20 story points this sprint!"), because they like to be "data-driven".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

The irony is that one could still have predictability and metrics without Scrum, and they would likely say as much if not more. Instead of expecting your devs to manually participate in rituals, you can use their actual output over a large time frame and extrapolate those.

Admittedly, that is my biggest problem with Scrum. Humans are by default the most volatile factor. While we could minimize its contribution, Scrum instead inflates the importance of the human factor. Example: estimating.

Grooming the back log for priority with just the people who are critical in deciding that priority, is common sense. Almost every methodology recommends this. Yet estimating is a tough sell: at the start, it is largely deemed useless due to inexperience. Yet as experience in estimating furthers, so too do metrics become available which make estimating unnecessary. Worse is when estimating and even re-estimating practices can easily eat entire days worth of productivity (a few hours per person + a high likelihood of hours around that meeting to be less efficient than could-be, loss or lack of flow). This is before we add that estimating has very little empirical evidence behind it (#NoEstimates) and psychological effects make things even more volatile (anchoring effect, Parkinson's Law, etc.)

I can't speak for others, but I went into this field because I want to minimize the human factor in anything mundane or boring, allowing people to maximize their participation in anything fun and exciting. For me, Scrum does the exact opposite.

> The irony is that one could still have predictability and metrics without Scrum

I like to think that it would take a technically competent manager to understand the progress and performance of the developers. OTOH, with Scrum, you can generate numbers, however meaningless, without such prerequisites.

That's probably why some managers like it.

Honestly, while my cynical self would love this to be true, generating basic metrics (numbers of bugs solved, number of features added, average time a developer spends in meetings, etc.) doesn't require a lot of technical competence and already say far more than a vague metric like "velocity" (which, most of the time, is really just speed). Especially if the tool allows one to do this with a few clicks.

More likely is that, if teams were truly "self-managing", the number of management, management-lite and pseudo-management roles should be lowering drastically every year (or at least converting to hybrid roles). Yet I barely if ever see a Scrum adoption result in the majority of managers losing their jobs or changing the type of role they are performing. I also doubt data scientists would appreciate these middle-school tier statistics be called data science.

> stripping developers of autonomy and creativity

Why would you say that? There's nothing in the theory of scrum that makes a claim on the autonomy and creativity of developers. On the contrary, if you look in the scrum guide, you will find words like self-management, and independent, and cross-functional.

> Certain managers like it because it generates metrics, even though the metrics are meaningless drivel("we completed 20 story points this sprint!")

Story points do not figure anywhere in the theory of scrum. It is quite a different invention.

The theory (I'd prefer the word "hype") and practice of Scrum are two entirely different things. And of course, if and when it all goes wrong, you're just not doing Scrum right.

> The theory (I'd prefer the word "hype") and practice of Scrum are two entirely different things. And of course, if and when it all goes wrong, you're just not doing Scrum right.

I'm really struggling with this argument.

So if someone reads a text, picks from it things that he likes, throws away things he doesn't like, tries to apply the result in practice, but without success — how come he gets to blame the original concept rather than his own invention? Why call the method derived via picking, choosing and mixing with bits from other texts by the same name as the original text? What makes people think that they are "doing scrum" when they are not?

>Scrum was created by one of the creators of the agile manifesto as a way to see consulting/training around the 'Agile' idea (timeframes may differ a bit, but they were linked).

Scrum was actually created by two Japanese dudes [0], and was for the manufacturing industry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#H...

Thank you for the info. I will leave the comment as is for reference.

Again, thank you!

Japanese also came up with Kaizen, which Scrum should be about but isn’t, along with Kanban, the process- not the generic term for workflow that some use it as.

While we’re on the topic of Agile, though, it’s best not to forget its eXtreme Programming roots.

XP for me is the core of agile software engineering I can relate to, principle driven rather than process focused a'la Scrum.

For me scrum optimises for a very narrow perspective of software development which did not align well with long term and sustainable software engineering and ownership. If i was far less than generous I'd say scrum is design for children rather than responsible adults.

For success as a leader i should be focusing on building and fostering a team than does not need the self imposed constraints of scrum but are rather conscientious and vested enough to build and deliver what the company needs and the team can maintain.

Scrum is pretty lightweight. A lot of people add to the core of Scrum and refer to the whole thing as Scrum when that is not accurate. A few uber coders in a garage cranking out their dream idea may not need Scrum. In my experience, it’s most needed in the corporate world where there are tons of development teams being hounded by managers and product owners to constantly cram more and more work into a fixed amount of time left before some arbitrary deadline, and getting management buy-in on Scrum or something similar can actually be a much-needed protection for dev team sanity.

This sums up my thinking. Scrum is a contract between developers and managers, especially non-technical managers.

Developers have always complained about being micromanaged or being given business objectives that don't make sense or about changing requirements or some such. But non-technical managers at the same time typically complain that their developers are prima donnas and that their team produces unpredictable and non-repeatable results.

If you understand KPI's, you understand scrum. Scrum exposes the development process to managers and in theory is supposed to give them a better idea of what the team is doing, what they're having problems with, and what the consequences of their management directives are. If that leads to better management of the team, scrum is a success.

Yes, and Scrum done well can promote a sense of well-being through fulfillment of points and provides rhythmic but varying work for those that like process.

Done poorly it may create a wealth of problems. The cadence may create undue sense of urgency that may lead to unhealthy levels of stress or to depression and desensitization of missing work targets. Nonsense competition may arise due to points and velocities.

But Scrum reinforces all of that; arbitrary deadlines, sprints check; lack of control, product owner the only named role check; process centric, corporate compatibility check.

Here here. Loved XP, still try to let it influence what I advocate for at my place of employ. XP leans heavy on discipline. It succeeds well when there's an environment of trust towards the team, and the team values discipline as a way of working better together.

XP is awesome. YAGNI forever.

Yep. We wanted XP. We got Scrum instead.

Scrum, for me, is not for development but for Operations, I don't even like the term scrum but simply WhiteBoard Meeting. Flatten structure, everyone knows what everyone else is doing, chance to mention things on one's mind, perhaps a hiccup from the day or shift before, not hosted by a ScrumMaster just rotate around the team, everyone has a voice, strict visible time limit.

It's super in Operations.. not super in Development.

Sprints make no sense at all. If you can do it you can do it. Stay at it and go on a spectrum of pumping consistent results to once in a blue moon creating something special. Sprint adds nothing to that other than a phrase to use in a conference call to hide ineffective working practices. I have Sprinted on a 35 hour working week, I have also worked normally on a 35 hour working week. Results are similar aside from stress others show where Sprint = Haste, and Haste != Speed or Quality.

The achilles heel of Scrum is that it sold out the prescriptive XP practices that enforce sustainable software engineering discipline as well as communication with business concerns in order to sugar coat the fast feedback cycles. Scrum/Kanban feedback is about "doing the right thing". XP feedback is about "doing the thing right". Codebases on projects using Scrum/Kanban without XP technical practices tend to molder and succumb to what I like to call "Scrumrot" within about 18 months. Seen it happen many times.

I worked at a company where the CEO was into Kaizen and brought it up frequently at team meetings. It was otherwise as dysfunctional as any place I've ever worked. It was also my first, and hopefully last, exposure to "full court" Scrum. Both of these are now flags to me that a company is more into process than results, which is sad, because they both came from good places.

That article doesn't even create anything. It's a comparative summary of existing practices in the manufacturing sector. The word "scrum" appears, exactly once, as part of an incoherent rugby metaphor.

Elevating a waffling HBR feature to the status of antecedent decalogue is totally on brand for the clerical formalists that promote Scrum.

In high performance teams, Agile begins where Scrum ends, and as the remarks here extensively demonstrate, awful working environments won't be improved by a bunch of ceremonies.

Are you totally anti process? If not, which process do you find more palatable than scrum? Your comment is eye opening for me because I don’t know that I’d find a job if I decided scrum was a dealbreaker. What kind of projects or companies do you target that don’t have some flavor of scrum?

I’ve always felt scrum adds value for new teams who haven’t worked together or on greenfield projects in a space the team hasn’t worked before. That’s when the standups identity impediments. That’s when retrospectives uncover process or people issues. Once the team hits a stride it’s time for the training wheels to come off and then it’s just a Kanban board.

If you’re looking for a book — shape up — from basecamp goes through how they develop software and it looks great ! I am giving it a try. It’s very agile but not scrum.

I also agree that after a team gels together there’s no need for a lot of the overhead that comes with scrum.

My experience in organizations have always been to continuously shape the process depending on how the team feels about it and not call it scrum

We've been using this since late 2019, and generally been loving it. The concept of things being bets, plus fixed-time variable-scope are amazing, imho.

I've interviewed with a couple teams that are using Shape Up and I got the general sense that the developers were happy with the process.

Here is the readable on the web version: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook

Obligatory PDF: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf

Shape Up Your Agile (article): https://thinkfractional.blog/shape-up-your-agile/

I've never had an issue communicating with a team without scrum, even when very new. On the other hand, communication gets worse with scrum, in my experience. Because everyone knows that the meetings are the time to communicate problems, they often delay all communication until the next day. And in some cases the morning meetings drag out to noon because that's when all the communication is going on, when it really just involves 2-3 people.

> Are you totally anti process?

Not speaking for OP but agile, straight from the manifesto, itself is anti-process, at least in the sense where...

> If not, which process do you find more palatable

Is a cogent question.

Which process do /you/ find productive and helpful? What would you change? What would you emphasize? Process is a tool to serve you and your peers and your stakeholders. Not to pay fealty. Not to choose sides. It can be picked into pieces and rearranged. It can be recalled or reorganized whenever it’s unsuitable.

The good agile teams I've been on had a LOT of process and were very disciplined.

But it was a process we decided on as a team, not something a consultant had read in a book.

Precisely. The best tool is the one people are bought into.

Exactly. Sorry for the ambiguity in my wording. I meant that the manifesto (like teams that do well adopting/reflecting it) is against proscribed process.

> the manifesto, itself is anti-process

I don't think that's true, it's "people over processes", it doesn't imply a "no processes" stance, just that you shouldn't _force_ a process and you should adapt.

IMO that's what the agile manifesto is about: adapting.

But that's the opposite of my experience with agile and Scrum in the companies, where it is used as an excuse for non tech managers to enforce what they feel works better for them. In terms of control or, in some cases, micromanagement.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

If the team likes scrum thats fine but picking scrum vs kanban, or bitbucket vs gitlab vs cvs, those are details a team cam and should be in charge of and revisit whenever they feel like. Because all that matters is working code, and what gets you there is skilled people that communicate well.

Working code is not all that matters, typically a business needs some predictability in output in order to plan ahead. If the business can’t function well because delivery is unreliable, sooner or later there won’t be any money rolling in to fund developers writing that code. Not every company will have enough ”skilled people that communicate well” for this to be an automatic byproduct of developers doing their thing, especially in larger or immature organizations.

> typically a business needs some predictability in output in order to plan ahead. If the business can’t function well because delivery is unreliable

the problem is that this assumes that estimates can be accurate, which in some projects may be the case, but in general there are always unexpected problems, things you didn't know you didn't know, etc.

If it happens that a company goes under because they lost all income because there was no deliverability, the problem was the company had the wrong team of engineers. Either too much "isolated geniuses" or too much inexperienced. Sometimes also happens that the management decides the way of doing work without technical involvement. Even companies I've been that decided to rewrite a mature and solid big piece of software, because they "needed to use more strategic technologies". Meaning, the technologies that were the "cool thing to use if you are a cool startup". And they use Agile (so they claim).

It doesn’t assume that estimates are accurate in that they need to approach perfection, but it does assume that good processes and tools can help make them reliable enough to be useful for the business over time (who of course still have to take the remaining uncertainty into account).

There is a reason the agile manifesto starts with the line I quoted. The number one mistake made is thinking that some tool or process will let them crank out code steadily though inefficiently with developers of unknown ability. But if you dont have those individuals interacting well there is no tool or process that can save you.

> The number one mistake made is thinking that some tool or process will let them crank out code steadily though inefficiently with developers of unknown ability.

Here’s where I disagree and would say that a well-functioning process certainly can help with that, albeit not perfectly, of course. And that is by aiding the invididuals involved in interacting well.

When the manifesto came out I thought it was a great idea, as I recall. But now I can't recall what was in it. Something about "people, not popcorn." Or was that The Cathedral and the Bazaar?

You can say we should separate agile from scrum, but scrum basically is agile today (and Kanban!), modulo the odd free thinking, practically self-managed shop. Agile comes in via consultant after a shop declares itself on a "burning platform."

What it's become, IMO, is work about work. I hated it.

The only contact I have with it now is when my manager has to hang up the phone because she has to go to the standup of other managers. (I drive a truck.)

The infamous scrum of scrums. Always makes me laugh. I think all status meetings should be abolished, without exception. Meetings should be for making a decision with all the players present.

Or requirements writing sprints. How agile, how aware of the limitations of big up front design.

Scrums and such meetings are for the benefit of the organizer (boss, ...). Only exception is if someone is blocked but he is bad at expressing it directly to the person responsible.

I've been part of many meetings/scrums where the point was that the manager gets the info of how things are progressing but the meeting itself was net negative for the developers as they lost their flow and some of their time.

In my experience, the teams that do scrum well don’t do scrum by the book. They look at scrum and modify the things they like to work for them and get rid of things they don’t like.

Which is one of the core principles of Scrum. Scrum as taught it merely the starting point.

> but for me personally, I hate it with a fervour

Is it possible to fall in love with someone so quickly over one line written on the web?

Agile indeed.

I am taken but thank you for the laugh :)

> Agile is at is core just some suggestions for teams to work well together

I don't think that's right. Agile is a way to manage projects as an alternative to waterfall. The 'communication' stuff on top of that might work well with it, but that's all to do with how you run your agile process. Agile itself is just about the order you do stuff.

Imagine that for your project, there 3 'features' that are needed. Each feature needs, designing, implementing and validating (testing it works). You end up with this grid of all the work that needs doing:

           F1 F2 F3
    Desi
    Impl
    Vali

In waterfall, you progress through this grid top to bottom. You design all the features, then you implement all the features and then you validate all the features.

In Agile, you progress through the grid left to right. First you work on feature 1, doing design, implementation and validation, and only then do you move on to feature 2, then feature 3.

The reasons for doing this are many and varied. The obvious ones being that in waterfall you don't have anything useful until everything is done, whereas in Agile at least you have F1 fully done a third of the way through. This also means that you can decide that F3 is more important than F2, and then later that F4 which you'd never heard of is needed when F2 isn't (and you can decide this as you go along).

This bare concept of agile is almost always what you want to do, particularly for software projects. The concepts of backlogs, sprints etc. are all the process that has built up to make this work in real life. Approaches such as Scrum have then built on top of that giving a whole lot of extra practices about how teams should work. A lot of that is variable in usefulness and how well it is used. You don't want to get away from the underlying value of the agile process though.

> Scrum was created by one of the creators of the agile manifesto

I can't wrap my head around this. The first item of the agile manifesto literally says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

From the link

> When [the three of us, along with many others] created the Agile Manifesto in 2001, Kent Beck reiterated his vision to heal the divide between business and development. Kent created the website, and we were stunned when thousands upon thousands people signed this website. So we decided to form an organization – the Agile Alliance. I was the first chairman of this organization. The next chairman was Ken Schwaber. He decided he wanted to do something else. He wanted to make the alliance a revenue making machine…

> Ken came to me some time later, telling me he was going to make a class called Certified Scrum Master Class. I thought it was a dumb idea. But a dumb idea that works is not a dumb idea. People came and liked it. The more he charged, the more people came. He started giving out certificates, and he made a little organization off to the side – the Scrum Alliance. Lovely thing to happen.

Spot on. Bringing the stakeholder to the squad (just for a daily meeting, for example) is a great Agile insight which doesn't need Scrum at all. I highly recommend it.

I don't have much interview experience so I am wondering how you do this: "It is literally one of the first questions I ask in an interview about their processes and excuse myself from the process if I see if they follow it"

Do you abruptly cut the interview short or do you just make a mental note and continue?

Typically you would just make a mental note and continue. Walking out mid interview is considered kind of rude and it's worthwhile in the long run to not be rude if you can avoid it.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but just make a mental note and continue. Personally I'd even continue the interview process, I'm a Scrum hater, but an interesting project, a smart team, a big paycheck? You might have to put up with scrum, it's widespread.

I don't get up and leave. Usually in most interviews at the end companies ask if you have any questions. I usually try to understand their processes and ways of working.

Usually after this, I take some time just to 'calm down' and think about it, and I usually shoot them an email saying that I appreciate the time and opportunity, but I don't think it will be a good match and wish them luck finding a better suited candidate. I had a few replies thanking me, most just don't reply and I had one (only one) insulting me and my experience and saying they only interviewed me out of pity as my experience wasn't good enough (I had more years (8) of experience in the tech stack they used than the number of years the company existed!:)) Was from a Who's Hiring thread here actually :)

> Usually after this, I take some time just to 'calm down' and think about it, and I usually shoot them an email saying that I appreciate the time and opportunity, but I don't think it will be a good match and wish them luck finding a better suited candidate.

I LOVE sending letters like this. It's the politest middle finger you can give to a douchey hiring manager or organization.

I think the value of calming down is normally to not send impolite or passive aggressive communications.

I don't have so much experience interacting with recruiters/hiring managers. However, every time I've let some frustration show at work, in the moment I felt vindicated and righteous, only to feel like an ass about 24 hours later. Normally when I feel the need to vocalize a frustration, I try to write down or remember why I'm frustrated, but wait to actually action the communication until I'm calm. Goes a long way to focus on solving problems, without identifying people as the problem.

In terms of stand ups and such, it really depends on how well they are done.

Typically, they just become another box to check. “This task is underway, blah, blah..” and everyone tunes out.

I’ve seen them done well and usually because they are focused on prioritization - “is this still important? No? Stop doing it”.

I personally wouldn't work at a place that didn't do it. Scrum ceremonies are there to get alignment. If you don't do them, you end up working on the wrong things. If these meetings take up more than 1-2 hours a week, then you're doing it wrong.

If it works for you great. But this 'you are doing it wrong' is at the core of scrum. When scrum doesn't work, is because you are doing it wrong, and never a problem with scrum itself. No true Scotsman and all that.

I have been a professional developer for close to 20 years, 10 more if you count my hobby/learning path as well. All teams I worked that implemented scrum were a hindrance to me and not a benefit. It may work for others and that is fine, but it isn't a silver bullet solution for 100% of the cases.

I feel like various Agile frameworks might be saying “You are doing it wrong” to people using Waterfall for software development. In that case, I would agree. 16 years ago I talked to a project manager who had done PM for a nuclear plant and Waterfall is ok for that, but not usually for software where you learn more from users about what should be done and tweaked as you go along. Perhaps you are just seeing Scrum in places where they are doing Scrum wrong, e.g. adding to it and making it heavy-handed and overbearing.

If you’re on a team of more than a couple people and you have stakeholders feeding requirements to the project, what do you do that’s so different from the simple process of Scrum? It’s just set up to say, hey, we’re going to work on these items for the next week or two, and please don’t constantly come interrupt me in the middle to ask me to fit in a bunch more things than what we agreed to work on in this short time period. Then we’ll show you how it’s working and you can decide what we do next.

> people using Waterfall for software development.

Is anyone really doing Waterfall now? Maybe earlier some industries used a Waterfall like process. But actual descriptions of Waterfall seem to go back 50 years to Royce's paper, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. That model was explicitly described as bad. I don't fully agree with that paper, but his suggested improvements are more iterative. Personally it seems like now Waterfall is mostly used as a strawman.

> but not usually for software where you learn more from users about what should be done and tweaked as you go along

I agree with that. I wonder if Agile is highly influenced by it's leaders being closely involved with consulting.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. There are definitions of scrum methodologies. I too have worked many places that did not have success with scrum -- all of them had one thing in common, they didn't actually follow one of them. All of them "compromised" with other business interests, and typically the compromise was on the "hard to follow" parts -- the core tenets of scrum! Some of them were 100% waterfall, but with scheduled meetings bearing titles that mimicked scrum processes. These aren't "people doing scrum wrong", these are people in a cargo cult.

I have only worked with a single team that fully followed a scrum methodology, but it was very eye opening and successful.

How many of your bad experiences with scrum bent more than a couple of these rules? How many were always followed? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28software_development%...

Some big things I've learned are:

* Sprint planning has to be mutual. Management cannot plan a sprint on their own, they do not have enough information to accurately plan for order or operations or effort required. Furthermore, participants need to understand the direction and priorities of the project in order to do their job properly.

* You cannot change a sprint that is in progress. Mitigating switching costs are a huge part of the benefit scrum provides. Compromising on this defeats the point of the process. It's hard to tell management "no", but you have to do it. If fire-drills are unavoidable, then you must to account for this time when you plan a sprint.

* All stakeholders must attend backlog groomings and sprint reviews. If the inputs to the process are guesses, then the outputs will be guesses. This is just as important when prioritizing work items as it is when giving feedback on completed items. It must be first-hand. Documentation and/or status updates simply do not even come even 10% close to the power that a live demo does.

> I too have worked many places that did not have success with scrum -- all of them had one thing in common, they didn't actually follow one of them

To me that approach goes against the original principles for agile, especially "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools". I'm not a huge fan of highly structured Agile and scrum processes. But I think the best agile implementations come when teams have ownership over their own agile processes.

And if the team truly has ownership they are responsible for their success or failure. Sure, their process may be objectively bad, but that doesn't mean a better process should be imposed from outside of the team. The team should have some level of trust to fix it.

I also disagree with your three points being hard requirements. They may be really good suggestions for teams doing scrum, especially in lower trust environments. All three are specifically for scrum, for instance they lose meaning if you aren't doing sprints. But that's just arguing semantics. Fixing compromised scrum isn't strictly necessary if the team can be successful by dropping scrum.

Bear in mind I was speaking specifically about following scrum. While agile is flexible and open ended, scrum is a specific way to implement agile, and it has a process.

If, for instance, you’re not doing time-bounded sprints, you are objectively not doing scrum. Scrum has an implementation guide that outlines this.

https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

> While implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices.

Many people borrow ideas from scrum for use in their homegrown agile solution, and that’s ok. But it’s not scrum.

"Hindrance to me" is the wrong attitude unless you run the company. Scrum is not for the team to work faster. It's for the teams work to be visible, understood and correctly allocated. I find a lot of devs who dislike scrum dislike being told they have to work on company priorities instead of giving open ended estimates and then doing whatever they want.

What a sad and nihilistic view. Experienced devs are smart people. If you communicate the company targets, priorities and deadlines clearly, they will naturally find a way to self-organize to achieve those goals. Devs think it's micromanagement when they feel like they are not trusted to execute the communicated plans, but are instead required to report every hour worked to some slavemaster who might at any moment "allocate" them to a different task.

Not in my experience. In my experience, if you give the devs leeway, they'll come up with some totally overengineered architecture with the latest tech in it (which is great for their CVs) and will spend a lot of the time bikesheding over nonsense (e.g. killing each other PRs because "too functional" or "not functional enough"). The developers don't care about the company goals, but they care about their CVs and personal preferences regarding languages, tooling etc.

Also, if they team does not deliver, at the end of the day it's their manager who gets the blame, not them - so why should they care? Basically, smart devs are repaying the psychopathy of the typical company owners with a 100% selfish behavior of their own. That's the what I've seen in the wild, not the positive scenario you're describing. Perhaps it's "late stage capitalism" in the flesh.

Well I suggest you stop working with colleagues you describe as psychopaths ASAP for the sake of your own mental health. I could never work with a developer who sacrifices the company's / team's business goals for a line in their own CV.

But it's indeed first and foremost the managers failing not recognizing these attributes in their team members, and not working to fix their attitude (which clearly is the underlying problem here). Imposing more process will not fix the team not caring about the product / business.

If you are not up to changing jobs, I'd suggest you try openly bringing up your concerns in a retro. Unless, you actually don't care about the product yourself either?

The colleagues in question are all gone now - they got better jobs thanks to the mess they've created in my project...

Psychopaty is perhaps too strong a word - they're just taking care of their interests. Perhaps in the olden times they were aligned with the interest of the employer, but currently they're clearly not (my employer has just announced that they'll lay off a couple hundred of IT people are replace them with an Indian outsourcing company, purely to cut costs...).

I don't care about the project either, but as a tech lead, I'm actually paid very well by the company to take care of its interests - incl. killing off any wild ideas that the devs might have. This (staying on old and boring tech that works well, but is not what will help me get the next well-paid job) will hurt my career in the long run, but my plan is to actually go FIRE within the current job, so it's not a problem. Most people don't have such plans though and hence they don't benefit from toiling for an ok wage with boring tech that gets the job done.

The underlying systemic problem is of course the fact that the whole industry (at least here in Europe) is crazy about following the latest tech trends for trends sake, and thus running along on the tech treadmill is the best way to get highest compensation. In the US I believe it's different, because there joining a FAANG gets you the most money, and they mostly use custom tech anyway, so they don't care about the latest open source hits (of course, you have to leetcode instead, so it comes with its own set of problems).

> my employer has just announced that they'll lay off a couple hundred of IT people are replace them with an Indian outsourcing company, purely to cut costs

Not one large-sized Nordic bank by any chance? ;)

The flipside of using latest tech is you should have easier time hiring new people to replace the ones who left. But I am certainly not denying that hiring devs who are willing to commit to the business is a really hard problem. Companies should maybe focus this more in their hiring practices over just the technical skill profile. Good developers will learn the tech stack in the job, if they care.

Also, people retention / satisfaction is pivotal in keeping the commited people on board. Doing massive outsourcings to India is certainly not a good signal to send to those who feel their skills and commitment could be appreciated elsewhere as well.

> Not one large-sized Nordic bank by any chance? ;)

I will say no more ;)

> The flipside of using latest tech is you should have easier time hiring new people to replace the ones who left.

I've heard this argument before and it's basically a non sequitur for me. For example, there are fewer people who know the latest and greatest Scala libraries than those who know for example Java 8. The people who have learned Java 8 have not died or retired yet - they are still in industry, in large numbers, and hence it's easier and cheaper to hire them. Whereas you have to fight for the bleeding edge guys - usually by offering them high-paying contracts (which are the reason half of these guys are following the bleeding edge trends in the first place...).

the problem exists too in the US due to large amounts of venture capital lying around. Ask yourself why many startups run on K8's yet they don't have the SRE requirements google has. Too much resume padding.

Good luck, if you're a engineer trying to make things work without too much ceremony. everything is about chasing the latest and the greatest, whether it makes sense for the problem at hand or not.

Scrum is one way transparency and those that recognize that are occasionally put off by the fact.

> I find a lot of devs who dislike scrum dislike being told they have to work on company priorities instead of giving open ended estimates

No, what I dislike is being told to go work on feature X, when I know that we’re going to run into issues with feature Y in a matter of weeks, and then having to spend nights and weekends fixing it when it eventually does break, because nobody trusted me to know what was good for the product.

Scrum gives people who have no clue what they’re doing the illusion that they do. The process is literally their only handhold to avoid feeling swept away. Like, I’m doing nothing else right, but at least we are following _the process_.

In Scrum the PO state what value they would like to see in the next sprint. Then the team start to pull in issues supporting that value. If you know that feature Y is going to result in none working software any PO pulling his/her weight will listen to you. After all, working software is more important that a new feature.

Again and again I've gone into the details of people's criticisms of scrum, and again and again it's turned out that they were just not actually doing it. Actually doing scrum does work 100% of the time as far as I can tell.

And on the other hand, you have a lot of testimonies here that say the only places they saw scrum work was when it was adapted to the team, and the ones that followed it to the letter failed.

It can't be both things at the same time. (out of curiosity, you say 100% of the time, how many companies you worked for that did scrum perfectly and had 100% good results?)

Only two that I'd call perfect, but I also saw a direct correlation between how much a company broke the rules and how bad the results were.

If you're working on the wrong things just because you don't do scrum ceremonies then there's a more fundamental issue with your team.

Define "the wrong things." I see a year or two of productive work before I'd have to reach for anything with genuine doubts about business value. I might not read my stakeholders' minds exactly, or hit their preferred ordering, but I know they'd be consistently happy with the changes.

Ownership and vision are kind of the point of midlevel and senior roles. If you'd fall off the track in a matter of weeks, something is seriously wrong.

Do you think that’s representative of most work in most businesses, that you could work for months and years and finish things sort of in whatever order you want? Most of my experience has been that the planning and priorities of the business are much more strict and immediate, and you need constant interaction between them and the technical people to deliver the right things in the right order, and hopefully at approximately the right time. Business goals come frome outside the technical teams, they’re seldon determined by the devs, no matter how senior.

I think that’s more or less what it means to work in a tech company, as opposed to an IT department. “The business” is not some external thing. Each org is responsible for some part of the business, and contains all the specialties needed to take care of it. Junior people may work only within their specialties, but senior people are expected to have close partnerships and shared understanding with their cross-functional counterparts. We talk with each other frequently, but few of those exchanges contain anything new or surprising. Usually just an agreement to do the obvious next steps relative to what we did last time.

I spend more the 1-2 hours a day in "ceremonies". Today we had a meeting to discuss the pervasiveness of meetings. The irony was palpable.

> then you're doing it wrong

What do you call it if everyone is doing it wrong?

Agile/scrum is not about software development. It's about business agility, managing uncertainty, and being able to adopt what you're doing to new information and new market situations.

You can't design, review and test new product designs in a word document. You need to be able to iterate, learn, adopt. PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act.

Scrum is just a framework that implements this. Main benefit for the business is that you don't have long periods where you can't change where you're going. And if you change your mind, you don't want to have to throw away a lot of useless investment. So you only plan short sprints, you deliver quickly, generate ROI, and improve your plan where you're heading.

Just a way to manage uncertainty.

Er... the scrum specific ceremonies are supposed to be a starting point for a team. The point of retros is to adapt your process to the team's needs as you go. So if your experience of standups, plannings, retros etc is bad it is by definition because they were doing bullshit scrum and not adapting.

Scrum and all agile processes are owned by the development team (including the PO). If they're imposing a cost and not bringing value to the developers, you're supposed to change them.

> If they're imposing a cost and not bringing value to the developers, you're supposed to change them.

And then, based on the comments seeing here, you are doing it wrong because

>if your experience of standups, plannings, retros etc is bad it is by definition because they were doing bullshit scrum and not adapting.

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