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Comment by zeroc8 | Hacker News Reader

I just don't get it why developers like Scrum. The whole thing was designed to give non-technical people more power over the ones who spent a lifetime honing their craftmanship. Standing around a table in the morning like assholes is not my idea of fun. Same for the "product owner" concept. If I develop something, I am the owner. I generally hate being micromanaged and being assigned microtasks that gives "them" total control over my workday while I have no idea what "they" are doing the whole day. Scrum was the reason why I left my last company and I'm much happier now in my new company, where we do not have any process at all, just a common goal. Instead of standups, the team gathers for a coffee in the morning. If I want to spend 3 days learning a new framework that might do the product good, nobody cares. The only thing that counts is the endresult. That means we are beating the product into submission until its good, even if it means rewriting the thing three times and missing deadlines. So no more Scrum for me. Never.

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I have totally opposite experience from what you wrote.

We have fast changing application and we use scrum and sprints to fend off business people. Because one day they want one thing, next day 10 things more.

With sprint I can tell them to go away and make priorities because team is not capable of handling those 10 more tasks. Which in turn makes it predictable for business people because they know my team will be able to put those 10 things in next sprint (if those are soooo important, which later always turns out not really) and have it ready in production in 4-6 weeks.

With product owner and "refinement meetings" I don't have business/sales people coming to me with stupid ideas and trying to force me to implement something. They have to put more work in it so that I get structured stream of work, of course it is not always perfect but better than random sales hitting you with something by your desk.

What is important I have my team "burn down rate" which helps to communicate it clearly and they cannot argue with the number.

Other important part is that estimations are done by dev team and I think important part is that our management is not arguing with the estimations. They show trust in developers and are not trying to push down estimations or improve burn down.

So in my view my team has more power over the process not the managers. What managers/sales get form it is clear information that they can use in their work. Unfortunately I don't think it is the case for much companies.

I mean I get the problems you're facing, but is there anything about scrum specifically that makes it easier to deal with them?

We just have a list of tasks we need to work on organised by priority and a quick estimate of the time needed to implement it. We don't need to meet every morning to follow that list, going through the list and re-arranging it once a week is fine.

If someone outside of our team wants to know what we're doing, they can look it up. And they trust us that we know how to prioritise tasks related to our own product.

I've worked within a scrum team before this and I prefer this approach so much more. Prior to this I never knew what I would face that day. It's whatever the project manager told me I should face in the morning meeting, even if it meant setting aside something I didn't quite finish yesterday but could finish within an additional hour or two.

You found a loose "lowercase A"/kanban approach that works well for your team! I also kind of prefer a kanban approach, if it works well for the test of the team/company.

> It's whatever the project manager told me I should face in the morning meeting

Just to be really clear - this is not "scrum". People can have a really difficult time with "agile" and related practices because they're often conflated with bad people/managers/teams. For most of my developmement career I've followed some sort of agile-two-week-sprint-scrum-with-daily-standup process and I've never been told what tasks I'm doing each morning. I've never experienced this problem you started (but ive definitely had other problems!)

At the risk of being a bit no true Scottsman, the best agile practicioners (and I don't mean the Deloitte/Thoughtworks paid-by-the-buzzword type) advocate for finding a process that works well for your team, picking bits from the larger "Agile Toolbox". That's True Agile.

We’re constantly refining our processes. It’s like any other part of the business in that it benefits in having a design thinking methodology applied or else it goes stale and fails to keep up with changing dynamics of the business and beyond. For example we decided to do fewer releases against conventional wisdom because we realised our customers were not able to keep up with training and other internal processes they are required to conduct for compliance reasons.

Exactly. When I first learned about Agile development they clearly stated there is no "Agile process". It is simply having only the minimum amount of actual documented/enforced practices needed to ensure smooth development. Is your team struggling to finish tasks because they're not communicating enough? Have a morning check-in where anyone who is having an issue can state their issue, someone else can chime in that they can/know how to assist, and they can discuss it afterwards. Team being overwhelmed by requests for new/unplanned work? Set up a task tracking system and prioritize your tasks ensuring things get done in the order they need to be with none forgotten. Software development doesn't look the same anywhere you go. What works for one team/customer/environment won't necessarily work for any other. Agile is adapting the process to the people. Alternatives like CMMI do the opposite by forcing the people to adapt to the process.

The number one issue I've encountered in my area is companies that say they use Scrumm when they really don't. Scrumm is a very specific, defined process, and as they clearly state in their "handbook" if you're not following the process exactly as it's described then you aren't doing Scrumm. Period.

> finding a process that works well for your team, picking bits from the larger "Agile Toolbox".

Absolutely this.

I agree with this.. I've personally been more effective in an async communication type of approach. Communication over email, slack messages, ticket comments.. just leave a comment on my ticket, give me time to ponder on it, then I'll respond. If there's anything mission critical that really requires everyone to sit down in a room together, then we can schedule a meeting.

I accept that not everyone's like me, though.

I think your preferred way of working is pretty close to what scrum aims to achieve. Often scrum gets implemented in totally the wrong way so I can understand your negative experience.

The scrum guide is treated as a holy text by some, but (as the scrum guide even states) agile teams should be self-organising and pick and choose what tools work for them.

> We have fast changing application and we use scrum and sprints to fend off business people. Because one day they want one thing, next day 10 things more.

Then you are using Scrum to obfuscate a core communications problem in your company. Either the business people are clueless about what they want and are flailing around in a panic, or they are not able to communicate their needs to you properly, or you are unable to understand their real business requirements, or they insist on micromanaging every aspect of your product. Or some combination of these factors.

You should not have to "fend off" your professional colleagues, you should be able to have an adult conversation with your peers and frame requirements and expectations accordingly. If your company culture prevents this then that's what you need to fix, not further burden the team with the demands of Scrum.

It's nice of you to write that and you aren't even wrong but what is he supposed to do about it? File a case to have the business people fired?

You're phrasing it as if OP is the problem but he isn't, at least not the most significant part about it. Have you ever been in an enterprise environment where people simply and subtly tell you to fuck off if you want to "have an adult conversation with your peers"?

Now you're stuck with the shitty situation and need to start fending idiots off because there is often ZERO interest to improve things like communication. It's often not a startup with 10 people where you can grab a coffee and go "Hey guys let's talk about our communication issues!".

These topics are highly political once a company is large enough and they are extremely rigid and hierarchical. Exceptions exist but they are, well, exceptions.

Sorry, but I felt this post was almost accusing OP of inaction when that's a pretty easy thing to say from the outside.

I’d like to double down on your defense of OP.

Communication overheard is an inherit trait of large organizations. To some degree we can improve this with digital technology, but it’s a fundamental problem.

If you need to rewire the communication pathways of 10 people, the complexity can be up to O(n^2) because you might need to make adjustments for how every individual is getting signal from other individuals. As organizations grow the old pathways of communication are less optimal, but it’s also more expensive to rewire communication. To some degree corporate communication overhead buys stability and consistency across the organization.

You should attempt to optimize communication with those nearest to you in a large workforce, but at a certain point all you can do is give feedback to corporate about the communication pain points. If you work in a large organization and you can optimize your local communications to be completely optimal you probably aren’t communicating with enough people to have a full impact on the organization.

I'm not accusing the OP of inaction: on the contrary, they are attempting to rectify the problem with Scrum, so they are trying to do something.

What I am saying is that using Scrum to paper over a dysfunctional organization merely adds more dysfunction. It's a bit like the old joke: you have a problem, you adopt XML as the solution, now you have two problems. If you have a dysfunctional organization, then you either fix that if it's in your power, grin and bear it if you can't, or leave if that's an option. You're not going to fix it with Scrum (or for that matter, Kanban or any other off-the-shelf process).

You’re offering criticisms of what OP is trying to do, but you have not offered an alternative. What is your solution?

Thus far, your position on this is too rigid and does not account for the spectrum of: org size, type, age, etc. It lacks maturity and awareness of the realities of many organizations.

If you’ve found a place where you can implement this stance: great! The vast majority of people are not in that position, and criticizing them for it is not a great look.

The vast majority of software engineers can’t change employer?

No, this is obviously not what I said. Nor is changing employers automatically better. There are (as I suspect you already know) a myriad of factors involved in choosing an employer and choosing to leave.

The implication that this is “the solution” is pretty naive.

Then you are using Scrum to obfuscate a core communications problem in your company.

No, they're using scrum to guarantee a minimum level of effective communication. Business people don't have to be "clueless" to be constantly shifting priorities: they are reacting to the day-to-day business realities of client requests and biz dev opportunities. They're acting professionally, and in good faith. But if the dev team constantly reacted to those shifting priorities, the constant context shifting would kill their productivity and morale. Scrum provides a minimal set of tools and practices to ensure stability for the dev team, so they aren't constantly in reaction mode and have space to think about the product and be proactive.

I'm constantly amazed by people who talk about the "burdens" of scrum, like it's a lot of work that wouldn't otherwise happen. Really? Let's look at all that "extra" work:

- talking to your teammates daily to share progress, but more importantly raise red flags if there are impediments

- demo-ing your work periodically to verify that the stuff the team says is done actually meets expectations

- periodically taking some time to design the software, maybe refactor stuff that isn't correctly modeled, and planning your work

And that's pretty much it. Do people really work in places where they don't do any of that stuff? They just wing it, test everything at the end, and hope for the best?

> Business people don't have to be "clueless" to be constantly shifting priorities: they are reacting to the day-to-day business realities of client requests and biz dev opportunities.

That makes the business people sound a lot like the guy in Office Space who takes the specs to the engineers. If they are just a secretary who will rapidly oscillate priorities based on what customer yelled the loudest yesterday that isn't very useful to the business. The purpose of a product team or anyone in that capacity is to try and understand client needs prior to the client actually having them, rapidly changing priorities is generally evidence of that not happening.

> If they are just a secretary who will rapidly oscillate priorities based on what customer yelled the loudest yesterday that isn't very useful to the business

This is a gross mischaracterization, and depends greatly on the industry, stage of the product, nature of the customer, etc. I've seen major organizations shift an entire 6-12 months of roadmap to cater to one or two key customers with unique requirements, just based on the sheer size of the revenue from the deal.

Re-prioritization happens for many reasons, and while it's absolutely true that rapidly shifting priorities can be a major red flag and may be extremely detrimental, it's also true that sometimes this is just the nature of the beast. And when that's the case, having a good business/product/whatever you label it layer to shield the engineering teams is critical.

> The purpose of a product team or anyone in that capacity is to try and understand client needs prior to the client actually having them, rapidly changing priorities is generally evidence of that not happening.

Again, this depends on the kind of software shop this is. If you're building the next social media platform, you have an entirely different set of problems and concerns from a behemoth enterprise software platform trying to beat the other behemoth for that next $30M deal.

Agreed. Most of the complaints I read that aren’t just related to awful management are typically to the effect of “I’m being required to function as part of a larger organization instead of doing what I want.”

There are no perfect solutions to project management, and if you prefer to work in tiny organized communes without corporate direction then that is your prerogative. I’ll be right there with you. Otherwise, it sounds like some developers here are just annoyed that their team and departments don’t revolve around their individual desire to not be managed.

Totally - you shouldn’t. But sometimes you have to use common tools and practices to protect your teams workload and manage the expectations of an often frustrated larger business.

Plus not everyone has the privilege of a good base experience, or the option to just find a better cultured company.

How do you solve it when you have Billy and Bob. Billy is working on customers X, Y, Z. Bob is working on customers C, F, G.

Billy and Bob want different things for different customers. Billie gets commission on solving stuff for his customers, Bob for his own. Both of them promise their customers everything next month.

Now you have 10 developers and Billie convinced 5 of them that building his things is important. Other 5 devs are convinced by Bob to work on his ideas. Developers are not informed about how much each customer is worth, as they don't need it for their jobs (just as Billie and Bob don't have any access to source code, databases and servers). Remember you need to have "least knowledge/privilige" principle because you don't inform all employees on all details of company deals (because I am writing about B2B products).

For me professional way is to have a product owner who listens to both of them, knows how much each customer is worth for the company, checks with the team how much each feature costs and makes priorities. You create a single line of communication and defined process. You communicate in a clear way what can be achieved when, well maybe with a bit of a slip here and there. Billie and Bob get one person to communicate with, get clear forecasts that then they can communicate back to the customers.

Maybe that is different if you have B2C products because then you don't have such scenario there.

Or there are just multiple stakeholders with differing needs.

The benefit of having a single PO is that they reconcile the competing priorities and the developers don't have to do it themselves.

All true but do you have any practical solution to dealing with incompetent micro-managing middle managers when you don’t have the power to fire them?

Yeah. I'm glad this person is not on my team. The whole attitude sounds toxic as fuck.

My last place had those problems, but scrum was used in the opposite way. If we pushed back on things, we weren't "agile". Burn down was used a a club even though the model they chose would usually result in everything pending until the last two days of the sprint. Our estimations were completely ignored, plus the fact that they were estimations. We would make estimates, and be told they weren't commitments. Later when stuff would be pulled into the sprint, the team lead and manager would lower them, and we'd be castigated for not meeting them.

> We would make estimates, and be told they weren't commitments.

Yeah, this is ridiculous; Scrum actually changed the term from ‘Commitment’ to ‘Forecast’ back in 2011. But the industry didn’t pay attention to that minor but important change.

- https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast

It seems like your team is at war within your own company. You are actually building a wall! That doesn't feel right, and doesn't feel any more positive than what the previous comment was describing.

It's not a wall, more like a moat with a drawbridge :)

The drawbridge is lowered every two weeks and that's when the team delivers and demonstrates the stuff they did during that time. This is also the time the stakeholders get to present the prioritised list of work that needs to be done during the next two weeks (Product backlog).

During the two week period if the stakeholders need to communicate to the Fort of Scrum, they can shout from the other side of the moat and the Scrum Master is the only one with access to the only tower in the castle where the shouting can be heard. The team has complete autonomy and peace to work for the two weeks.

And here I am, building tunnel under the moat, being cozy with the stakeholder in order to influence his decision and secure some sprints that make sense ( for my team, I absolutely don’t care about the product, it’s a lost cause behemoth, the product will be fine. )

I thought someone was digging a tunnel next to mine!

I don't think so. Within a company departments can have different interests that sometimes clash. A mature team would notice this tension and signal this to the stakeholders. I think developers often think that people outside scrum teams have a well thought through plan of things they are doing. That's often not the case, they're just trying to figure out what they need to do to get things done. If a team signals that business people need to make a priority call, that brings a lot of clarity. I think it's a good sign.

But this is exactly why we have these processes! Companies have trouble prioritising and planning _at scale_ - they're constantly at war with themselves - so we introduce a process to manage the inefficiencies of many people, with conflicting priorities and points of view, trying to develop a product.

I don't see it as a wall, but defined order (how new tasks are put into the queue) instead of chaos (when sales people come directly to the developer's desk and order new requests without others involved)...

I propose that you read "The Phoenix Project (A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)".

I don't feel like I am building a wall, I am building a structured approach to communication and software building that is predictable to deliver value to our business and our customers.

Exactly, it seems to me they aren't taken seriously / respected by the business side as professionals that can work autonomously.

Using scrum/agile to fix a lack of trust, not sure how that's going to work out long-term.

I would describe someone who has defined process, defined check-in periods, defined communication lines and is following it as a professional.

How do you work as a professional autonomously without setting rules for work and setting up process for regular progress check-in?

Perhaps think of it more as a cell wall - some things can pass through by osmosis, but ti is a much more controlled thing.

Well, I enjoy talking to the front line aka sales people to hear what's going on out there. I appreciate their input. While there might be lots of stupid ideas, there are also good ones, and some times I feel like it is a reality check which helps to get out of the developer bubble.

Difference is in talking as bouncing off ideas and sales pushing work on you or talking nicely and expecting you do things for him/her.

Yes, until one of the 10 tasks flips one of the assumptions and changes a large scale decisioning system on its head...The processes work for certain type of projects. F-16 pilots have different concerns than 737 jets than a tractor trailer driver than a bicyclist, if moving from point A to point B is what matters..

> If I develop something, I am the owner.

Funnily enough, it's precisely this attitude which has led to the creation of the product owner role, and Scrum in general.

Most developers I know are emphatically NOT good product people (despite what they may think).

A good product owner is quite difficult to find, as they need to combine: i) a user-centric view of what the product needs to be, ii) a business-centric view of what needs to be released, and when, iii) a developer-centric view to make the 'best' product, from a programming perspective, and looking towards the long-term.

> That means we are beating the product into submission until its good, even if it means rewriting the thing three times and missing deadlines

This is all well and good until a competitor launches before you (with an inferior product), takes all your market share, and when you eventually launch you're having to play catch-up trying to steal clients. Meanwhile the competitor is reinvesting their initial revenue in making their product better to match yours, which means they keep their clients, keep getting revenue, investment etc.

You may have a better product, but you'll end up going bust.

+1 to your third point especially. I'll even add that Agile development can be a big bonus in any market that has the potential for rapidly changing needs. Even if you don't lose out to your faster competition you may still end up releasing to a market that's no longer looking for the solution that you "perfected". Agile development allowing you to release a functional product as soon as possible, and adding to it as resources allow means you can pivot your development to meet new demands instead of bogging yourself down trying to produce the perfect solution to a problem that continues to evolve.

I think it's possible to have rapid releases without all the typical trappings of scrum. See: Facebook, who are decidedly not bust.

Maybe the answer is just 'hire better engineers'. Where better means they're good at the product decisions too.

I found this really depends how "scrum" is implemented. Personally as a developer I like several features of scrum:

- regular retrospectives, for improving the process

- regular demos, for having a continuous process showing value and that we are aligned with the companies goals (anybody who thinks the development team have done nothing for the last x months can simply be pointed to the demo recordings page on the intranet)

- some kind of short regular meeting throughout the sprint to update the PO ("daily standup", but does not necessarily need to be daily, or standing up), who can reset expectations, as opposed to announcing at the last minute it won't be ready.

- and a regular planning session with the product owner to work with them to figure out how to bring value to the business quicker, push back on things that aren't that valuable, etc.

But of course this really depends on how the process is implemented and the environment you're in. If retrospectives and demos are often cancelled because "we need to ship this feature to this customer now!", if the daily standups become all about "why is this not done yet, how much longer will it take" rather than an honest peer-to-peer "are we on track for delivering this, what does the PO need to find out/inform stakeholders of/what blockers are there" and the PO doesn't include development staff in the backlog refinement and just dumps tasks on the development team, then yes, you will have an experience that sucks.

So as a developer, I like doing scrum when it is implemented in a way that the dev team and PO are viewed as peers and we don't skip any of the meetings. And I hate doing scrum when it's essentially just being given a load of tasks that I have no say over, no retrospective to improve things, etc.

YMMV (depending greatly on the setup/environment you are working in, I think)

(edit for formatting)

Scrum can only be successful if everyone is viewed and respected as peers. This is a hard requirement for scrum to be scrum. Otherwise it's just micro management.

Often neglected are the Scrum values: Commitment, Courage, Focus, Openness, and Respect. Values form a foundation for success. When agile principles are ignored and Scrum values not incorporated, Scrum (or any other methodology or set of practices) can become just a control mechanism for Taylor-istic "resource management." Scrum can be a great way for a software engineering team to and operate when they understand and apply the values and use it to self-organize, deliver regular increments of valuable software, inspect and adapt.

Otherwise known as "I like doing scrum when it's not scrum but a totally different, less onerous, process I've incorrectly identified as scrum"

If you think SCRUM (done well or at least competently) is onerous then I am afraid your not doing SCRUM properly

No true Scrumsman?

Every time this topic comes up on HN it devolves into "if you think it's bad you are not doing it correctly". Perhaps everyone is indeed doing it wrong, but when 90+% of the intended audience is "doing it wrong" it might also be the case that the system is either too difficult too learn for most teams or the system does not match the incentives imposed by the environment it is typically deployed into.

> it might also be the case that the system is either too difficult too learn for most teams or the system does not match the incentives imposed by the environment it is typically deployed into.

The system is simple; the implementation is often shallow and ritualistic, imitating the how without understanding the why. But the way that the question was asked leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I think it is important to consider a technique as it was intended vs as it is implemented. It would be the same for TDD, or pair programming, or object-oriented design patterns, and so on.

When implemented properly, scrum is beneficial, because it makes it easier for the information to flow through the team and for the team to adjust to the reality. When implemented poorly, it is a hurdle, because it degenerates into a bunch of pointless rituals.

The "system" for dieting is also simple (eat less, sport more), and yet many people struggle with that too. What would be really interesting is a scrum variety that is easy for people to follow without losing effectiveness.

> The "system" for dieting is also simple (eat less, sport more), and yet many people struggle with that too.

Yes, but do people then go around saying "this dieting thing is totally dumb and a complete waste of time", "I just don't get why anyone would go on a diet", etc.? And how do those who have managed to stick to a diet and think they have benefited from it look at such people? Because this is the attitude that I think I am seeing in many comments in this thread.

Scrum is not dieting, it is just a particular diet. Dieting is agile. And it turns out that Scrum, like all faddy diets, only works for a very small percentage of teams, probably due to their particular character.

That character of enjoying being micro-managed as far as I can tell.

> That character of enjoying being micro-managed as far as I can tell.

We still haven't established what is it about scrum that makes you say micromanagement. Do you regard all prescriptive statements as micromanagement? Is a software framework, such as Ruby on Rails, or Laravel, or Django micromanagement? Are code reviews micromanagement? Is version control with git micromanagement?

Bad scrum is like the product organization going on a diet but the product owners/managers are still addicted to eating junk food.

I like the analogy.

Which is the point I hoped I had made, In fact when I was young I worked on a project for BS5750 (aka ISO 9000) and the v senior guy at BSI mentioned that very thing to me.

To add onto this: the argument of "you're doing it wrong" would never pass a usability or safety test, but this gets conveniently glossed over whenever the Scrum debate comes. Trying to wave the point away just makes matters worse. If that crowd believes this point is moot, they should actually defend why the 90% doing it wrong doesn't have any significance.

> If that crowd believes this point is moot, they should actually defend why the 90% doing it wrong doesn't have any significance.

I have a lot of sympathy for this perspective.

I also notice that 90% of everyone does everything wrong.

I don't know how to reconcile those two observations.

By admitting it is both right and wrong, and it entirely depends on the context and purpose whether one should decide it is "right" or whether it is "wrong".

Kids are using electrical plugs wrong when they stick a pointy object in it. That doesn't mean electrical plugs without child safety close to the ground aren't potential hazards.

Kids damaging their hands doing control-stick spinning minigames using a N64 controller without gloves are "doing it wrong", they could just wear gloves. Still, Nintendo lost that case, and such minigames were deemed problematic.

People browsing a website where the links turn invisible, the mouse doesn't turn into a pointer, the browser doesn't show it is loading and no loading icon is shown, are "doing it wrong" for not just waiting 10 seconds for the page to load. Despite that, UX practices rightly condemn this kind of behavior: at least add an "alive" indicator.

To some degree, you have to make things "stupid proof". That's part of this field. If for some reason, Scrum allows managers more power to micromanage, that's a potential hazard which has to be admitted. That's the problem with the "you're doing it wrong" argument. It doesn't acknowledge potential hazards. Instead, it tries to circumvent that discussion and blindly assumes that developers both can and should "just fix it" when managers are doing it wrong. There's no discussion to be had when everything goes back to "you're using the tool wrong", even if that tool is designed poorly.

What's worse, go and be the guy telling managers that Scrum should be getting them out of a job. The only people I see doing that are the people not dependent on managers, e.g. Uncle Bob and Allen Hobub, and anonymous reactions here. When you're the one who might lose their job making that statement, suddenly, suffering under misimplemented Scrum and whining about it on the internet doesn't seem so weird anymore.

Scrum requires some premises that many businesses have problems adapting to if they've had a micro managed process before.

Scrum is, for better or worse, an all or nothing if it is to reach its full potential. Once you have "real" Scrum, you can start adapting the overall process through retrospective. But if you start your scrum adventure with "Scrum but..." then it's not going to deliver of the promises.

It is not just micromanagement, it is also the rest of the business culture. Ego-less development and placing the team over the individual can great for productivity. These productivity gains accrue to the profit of the wider company and _might_ partially flow back to the team, possibly as a bonus or possibly as promotions. However, effacing yourself for the team is unlikely to result in the kind of visibility needed for career progression and with software salaries being what they are that can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands in income over the years.

In a way, scrum and its team-based mechanics form a kind of prisoners dilemma where the first team member to claim credit will gain much more of the value generated than their peers. These incentives need to be taken into account in any framework based on teams cooperating, because they have the potential to rapidly poison any team where people are jockeying for promotion.

The problem is often not scrum but the organization. Any organization can misuse any framework for micro management. Scrum is only successful when it empowers developers. If scrum doesn't empower you, then do something else or try to figure out what's stopping you from being empowered.

The difference between scrum and agile as I see it is that scrum is proscriptive enough that you can tell it doesn't work.

Agile is vague and handwavey enough that you can never really be sure that you're doing it or not. I think that was by design - a badly written rulebook won't spread as easily as a religion you can project your own hopes and dreams on to.

The best about such a process is when you have grown up above the book and can adapt it to what best suits your context.

otherwise known as "I'm not going to let Deloitte dictate the One True Method for building software and instead going to think critically about our own team".

Whether you're "Capital A-Agile" or not - following a bible down to the letter - is so completely irellevent. SCRUM is never the goal, developing software effeciently is. It's a means to an end. If you can think critically about what your team/company needs to do this, then you should.

This reminds me of the only company I've worked in that attempted to adopt scrum. We almost spent more time debating about whether a particular practice was scrum or not than we did actually doing that practice.

Have you read the manifesto? The whole point of agile is to continuously adapt the process to fit your team. Following SCRUM to the letter is exactly the thing you shouldn't do.

> Have you read the manifesto?

I'm sorry, but the basis of scrum is the scrum guide[0], not the agile manifesto. The scrum framework is fairly rigid (three roles, five events, three artifacts), and I do not remember whether it allows for much flexibility (one role instead of three, two events instead of five, two artifacts instead of three, that kind of thing).

[0] - https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

> when it's not scrum but a totally different, less onerous, process

Can you elaborate on what in the parent comment is not part of scrum?

What? It’s the opposite

He likes doing scrum when it’s actually scrum and not “scrum”

I think that standing up is actually really important!

We use it to keep things short and focused, since everyone wants to get back to their work and can not do stuff while also taking part in the daily.

> I think that standing up is actually really important!

Alas, it seems many people don't - I think I've only been at one place in the last 10 years who actually cared about keeping standups short and focused. I've been at places where standup was 20 people and took an hour every day.

Mind you, I've been at places where standup was only 5 people and still took 30+ minutes every day...

Yes, this is a known trick and that's why it's used in scrum. Like you say it also helps keep things focused as people pretty much cannot do anything but listen.

A famous example of that trick is the UK's Privy Council: "Customarily the sovereign remains standing at meetings of the Privy Council, so that no other members may sit down, thereby keeping meetings short." [1]

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

> The whole thing was designed to give non-technical people more power over the ones who spent a lifetime honing their craftmanship. Standing around a table in the morning like assholes is not my idea of fun

The morning standup works great when it's all technical people. Keeps the team up to date with each others' progress and cuts down on "I spent three weeks being stuck" problems. Here's what I'm doing, and what I'm doing next, here's what I need a little help on.

When management get involved and the meeting starts with jira thrown up on the screen, sure, then it's terrible.

> If I want to spend 3 days learning a new framework that might do the product good, nobody cares. The only thing that counts is the endresult.

Here's the problem with that, not every schedule can take that 3 day lag, and someone has to make a decision about whether the product actually needs that new framework, or if it's going to be good enough without.

Maybe you're great at making those decisions, but I've seen many times when people end up going off down rabbitholes either just chasing something shiny, or through a sense of perfectionism that actually holds back release.

The morning coffee also works great. I really do not understand why there is a need for formalism here. There is a meeting for what's planned for the week. There are the informal gatherings, like lunch. And if someone is stuck with something, he or she just asks for help. Easy as that.

It helps to give a forum to bring up being stuck, and an opportunity for others to hear it when they're not caught up in the middle of their own stuff.

Plus some people don't know when to ask for help, or when they're (for instance) duplicating effort.

Informal gatherings are not an appropriate venue - if this stuff only comes up then, then lunch gatherings are now work, and they're mandatory.

> Plus some people don't know when to ask for help, or when they're (for instance) duplicating effort.

This is the gist of it. Some people just have this (very sincere) belief that everyone else are clueless idiots and need to be nurtured, protected and helped. This is the spirit of our age, and Scrum in particular is just another manifestation of this belief.

I don't think everyone else is a clueles idiot, but there are a lot of them around.

If you have a small(ish) team of great people you can get a lot done with a very informal process. When you start to grow, or you're not necessarily hiring the best there are, you start to need this stuff.

And you don't always need the self-motivated, highly productive builders. Someone has to make small tweaks, pad out the automated test cases, maintain things, document etc etc.

I'm not arguing this, but what does it have to do with standups?

> The whole thing was designed to give non-technical people more power over the ones who spent a lifetime honing their craftmanship.

Interesting that it's never mentioned that Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the creators of SCRUM both come from the military.

In my experience SCRUM delays and systematizes everything and kills creativity. Kind of like the military.

> In my experience SCRUM delays and systematizes everything and kills creativity. Kind of like the military.

Systematizing everything and killing creativity is an essential part of making software projects less risky for companies. One of the largest risks to many software projects is the "bus factor" risk, where one employee leaving will scupper the entire project because they were the only ones who knew how it worked. If you have large sums of money riding on the success of a project, it makes sense to invest some time in processes that can mitigate the effect of one team member leaving. It's no surprise that these processes mimic the military, armies are entirely built around the idea that anyone can die at any moment without much impact on the mission.

Your basing this on what military / historical experience?

At the sharp end of a military I certainly see SCRUM/RAD/DSDM as analogous to the ww2 German style of pushing tactical decisions down to a lower level rather than rigid command from above ala the French.

Another thing nobody talks about much is that Executives and VP level people love to hire people from the military, because they do exactly what you tell them and rule with an iron fist.

Im sure there are ex-military people who are chill, but ive seen some insane ones running tech verticals in the past.

Heheh, you are clearly doing it wrong.

1) Non-technical people outside do not get the power. On the contrary its the team that gets much more power. The team is in charge of doing the planning, etc. If the team says: "we will deliver in 2 weeks", manager has no power to force them. Unless he says something like: "ok, in that case I do not need it and do this one instead - that will bring more money".

2) You do not have to stand for the daily. Some teams do it so it involves a little bit of exercise. But you can just as well lean or sit with your coffee and casually share your progress. Like a kitchen talk.

3) Product owner does not OWN your code you fool :D You are the owner. Product owner commands the product. So if you implement a message queue thats great, you can be proud. But was it really needed? Does it bring any money, stability, a value in general to the product? That is something that usually you cannot answer, because you are focused on the quality of the code and do not care about the bullshit numbers right? But in case you do, you are aware of the whole situation, the market, all the customers etc. and you engage in that part, then you are super senior team member, you are self-organized and you actually do not need a product owner. That is like endgoal for Scrum. To create such teams (with such great and senior team members).

4) Scrum does not prevents you from rewriting the code until its perfect. Like where did you get that twisted idea? Scrum even says that tech debt (bad code, needs refactoring, etc.) is incredibly dangerous and should be avoided!

Simply put, if you and/or people in your team and around are assholes that push just for the deadlines (and bureocracy) and do not care about the quality, that is completely 100% on you/them, not on Scrum. Scrum tells you NOT to do it and gives you the power to resist people that are trying to force you to do it like that. Scrum encourages you to share the knowledge and work with others to produce better quality and make your day more easier, comfortable without micromanaging, etc.

First of all, I'm not making the decision by myself, but discuss it with my peers before doing so. Second of all, the product owner does not command the product. We all do. At least that's how we see it here and it works out quite well. And we are not wasting time on childish stuff like giving story points to our micro tasks or sprint retros. And of course we care about the business numbers. Or do you think developers are too stupid to realize that this is what counts in the end?

Everything you said is great, but it's not how it plays out for a lot of developers. The people and the politics don't go away because some rules have nominally been adopted. Politically adept people¹ in manager/PO roles will continue to pretend they're following the rules while doing whatever they damn well please.

And when what they please is to micromanage or worse, the developers haven't suddenly gained people savvy because of these rules. They will have just as much trouble fending off the problems as before. Possibly more, in fact, because the (Scrum) rules can be used as cover. Or lead the developers to believe they're protected by the rules, so they don't need to be aware of politics.

---

¹"Sociopaths" if you will, but in the "Gervais Principle" meaning, not the DSM.

I came from the company that virtually invented Scrum (Easel Corp / Jeff Sutherland) -- showing my age now, I assure you -- it wasn't invented to give non-technical people the power over developers. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was created to help developers ensure that their lives could be validated in the timebox of work that was required of them. No offense, but you need to probably work in a better Scrum environment. Sounds like you haven't experienced Scrum properly.

Exactly. As far as I know, scrum doesn't have managers. Just don't tell that to the managers ;-)

as soon as he went all "the managers", i knew he'd been poorly educated around Scrum. The funny think about Scrum is that upper management doesn't like it. They'd rather operate in a waterfall approach because they can blow up roadmaps and not have any trace of the offense. With Scrum, you can do the "Ok, but that will require you remove X points from this Sprint and replace that work." Which has a check and balance on that sort of problem when someone wants something unplanned or changes scope on things. Scrum's s a tool to ensure that you have some level of "management" for the management but also it demonstrates how developers aren't always magicians. That's what people who don't like Agile/Scrum don't quite get.

I don't want to be "that guy" but everything you're describing above is not a symptom of Scrum per se but of a toxic working culture. Scrum does not suggest micromanagement or assigning tasks, the goal is for the team to be given a goal and work out what is needed to be done to achieve it. The team works together, no passing back and forth.

As for the PO being a "they" that's something that needs to be addressed. I'm not going to assume ill intent on your part, so let's assume this is again a symptom of a poorly performing team rather than you (or the PO) being unreasonable. But also bear in mind that the PO going off doing "stuff" is generally supposed to be all those things that get in the way of development, e.g. talking to stakeholders & customers, addressing prioritisation problems and trying to prevent the team being overwhelmed with too many goals at the same time.

I'm definitely not saying that micromanagement doesn't happen but I'm saying that you could take your new company's approach (no processes, just let the devs do anything) to the old company and you would have many more problems. It all, as ever, boils down to working culture and practices, and a company that is agile in name only. You can't fix that by splitting things into 2 week chunks and making people talk to each other once a day.

We do have a process. But it's less formal. Weekly meetings, priority lists, technical discussions, business discussions. If a problem comes up, we just talk to each other. It's easy and makes for a pleasant environment.

One thing I've learned over a long career in software is that a "bad" process that is followed precisely with top to bottom buy-in will always out perform the "best" process with lots of exceptions and lukewarm buy-in.

If you want something like Scrum or agile to work, you must have technical project managers that are independent and, quite frankly, they need to be assholes holding both the tech side and the business side equally accountable.

I see what you mean, and perhaps many/most standups feel pedantic.

But more generally, even in the total absence of "managers" and non-techies, communication is a good thing? Teams not individuals create great projects. Adhoc comms are great, but catching up with other technical folk casually over coffee daily for a couple mins (not more!) seems like a good idea?

Perhaps it's more the pedantic _format_ or feel of most standups that are what's terrible?

Teams are supposed to be self-organising in Agile.

When you implement an anti-agile process such as SCRUM and don't let the developers choose how to communicate, then no, it's not true that more communication is better.

Scrum is only anti agile if you read the guide and think it must be done exactly by the book.

Scrum dictate Planning, Review, Daily and Retrospective. How you do planning, review daily and retrospective is fluid and often adapted during retrospective. When you start you do it by the book and morph it into what suits the team and organization best.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

It's the first thing in the agile manifesto. The FIRST.

And yet here you are talking about processes and tools and claiming it's still agile.

> And yet here you are talking about processes and tools

First, the Agile Manifesto is not rejecting "the items on the right". It recognizes their value.

Second, the four principles of the Agile Manifesto are extremely general. It does not offer any recommendations on how to achieve the "items on the left". Scrum has a set of concrete recommendations for doing that.

Third, scrum respects all the "items on the left" of the Agile Manifesto. It emphasizes the importance of "individuals and interactions", of "working software", of "customer collaboration", and of "responding to change", and offers a framework for achieving them.

First, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.

Second, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.

Third, you're focusing on the very things it says not to.

You can't win this, Scrum is usually a proscribed process from management forced onto teams.

That's, by very definition, is the antithesis of agile. Agile is supposed to be about self-organising teams that decide how they work best. If that's scrum, fine, but if that's imposed by management, it's not agile, it's anti-agile. SCRUM, SCRUM masters, SCRUM cards, etc., etc. etc. are all anti-agile by very definition.

> If that's scrum, fine, but if that's imposed by management, it's not agile, it's anti-agile. SCRUM, SCRUM masters, SCRUM cards, etc., etc. etc. are all anti-agile by very definition.

There's a lapse of logic that is happening somewhere in the middle of this passage.

You can say that self-organising teams can decide that they work quite well within the scrum framework. Good.

You can say that self-organising teams can also decide that they do not like the formalisms of the scrum framework, and prefer some other set of guiding principles to achieve their agile ideals. Good.

You can also say that the management may muscle their incompetent way in and impose scrum upon the unwilling team, and by doing so divorce scrum from the agile principles that it was intended to uphold. Fine.

But what you cannot do is to conclude from the last statement that scrum is anti-agile. Just as you wouldn't conclude — if the management were so insane as to demand that all their teams program only in ruby — that ruby is an anti-agile programming language. What happened in that last statement has nothing to do with scrum and is no fault of scrum.

I've never met an actual, real developer (not manager or business wonk) who actually liked Agile. At most, people seem to tolerate it.

I don't like Agile when it's sold as such. I absolutely refuse to discuss Agile with certificate peddlers. SAFe is the worst of the bunch, with expiring certificates, they make money on renewal.

I'm a developer now managing product. if you apply a historical analysis perspective, Agile has either influenced our process, or our process may be described as post-Agile.

We have a backlog, organized by priority. We have self-organizing teams. Teams make their own planning and own their backlog. I, as the person responsible for product, take time meeting the people involved in making the product work in the market. Such as legal, finance, etc etc. The team does not have to participate in this, but they are welcome to.

What I have fought hard for is to not have management push tech stacks at teams. Developers get to decide, unless there is a legacy situation, and then they get to decide if they want to work with it. And we have a clearly defined org culture. That's as in who gets paid more, promoted, and why.

The developers have a higher-than average salary (algo for market value known to all and published internally), a % set bonus from total net, and an option to go for a higher % of bonuses by forgoing some of their salary. Some people like a known salary, some prefer a chance for a higher pay-out with more risk involved.

I'm writing a master's thesis on project management at the moment, part-time, and have had to do entirely too much reading up on Agile and project management history. Like I wrote, we can absolutely be classified as Agile. We just don't have it pushed down our throats, and we have a realistic culture - our part of the business is dependent on excellent developers, we treat them with respect, give them decision-making power, offer a share of the profits, and expect them to care about the product as a whole and their part in it.

If the "Agile" you have been exposed to does not treat developers with respect, nor establish a mutually beneficial organizational culture, the market will sort the organization out, as long as developers remain a crucial part of the equation.

Small a, fine, it's a positive little adjective. Big A, run for the hills.

If you are on a project with more than one person having some kind of process is a good thing.

‘Agile’ gives you the flexibility to determine what that process is. Scrum is a different story.

I am a real developer who likes agile, nice to meet you :)

I see the Product Owner role the most critical for the success of Scrum in general. This is for PO's simple yet not given properties - vision about the product, vision of success, and the ability to express this.

Everybody else in Scrum is depended on the PO's abilities. One can train to improve the expression and prioritization skills, but it's very hard to train to develop or (even to appropriate) a vision about the product and the success.

This becomes even more acute in corporate environment, most PO are recast from former Project or Product Managers, who by definitions are Managers, not visionaries, nor intended customers of the product.

As a result, that critical element - the product vision - simply cannot be shared. It's just another "Quarterly Goal" in disguise - "the stonk must up!".

So the corpo-Scrum has a greater chance to devolve into shared lack of vision and collaboration theater.

One could paraphrase "Show me your PO, and I will tell what your Scrum is".

I really haven't experienced this sentiment. It sounds like you had a bad experience. Scrum can be amazing depending on who is implementing it. Even 7 years ago at AWS, micromanagement wasn't and couldn't afford to be a thing, yet we were most definitely a Scrum team. It was what held us together despite the lack of management. Yeah there would be arguments between PMs and devs, but that is healthy, and most often the PMs lost said arguments. Everyone was placed adjacent to one another, and I adjacent to the project manager, which gave ample time for arguments, but in a way that was better for the team as a whole. It introduced a sort of democracy with continual meetings to ensure that we were working efficiently at any given time.

Agree completely, for a period of time I was working scrumless and quite happy with it. Got a new manager and some new tech leads join and suddenly we need several stand ups, scrums, and checkins because they don’t know how else to figure out what’s going on. It sucks.

I’ve never witnessed “I’m having trouble on this” -> “Oh I ran into that before, have you seen X” in an official Scrum. Official Scrums are just status updates for your manager/other authority figure.

We’re also cargo culting other processes (sprint planning) that don’t even fit in with how our company does planning - we do everything quarterly, most tasks aren’t really re-assignable - so it’s just a shaming session for people who underestimated task lengths or are running behind.

But, ironically, you are being 'Agile' in this new role.

I mean the term is sooo elastic it is hardly meaningful, but if you have a high skilled team, with clear shared concrete goals, producing code at pace, where the code is the measure of progress then that meets pretty much all the things that got written down in the Manifesto.

The fact that the manifest is just an observation of what we all know - how it feels to do really good work in a team, well, great.

The problem with Agile / work / life is that its hard to get all those pieces together and just as hard to maintain.

I think Programmer Anarchy is closest to the right idea. Get a bunch of (skilled) programmers together and give them a direction. But it is called anarchy to emphasise the idea you cannot have non-programmers in charge, or an organisational hierarchy getting in the way.

Changing that is what derails almost all Agile projects - its why Acqui-hires fail to keep the esprit d'corps, its why startups slowdown as they grow, its why steam engines were great before the factories, its ... humans aren't good at letting emergent order handle their day to day lives.

tl;dr - its not Agile or Scrum. Its us - its the difficulty of organising humans, its the constant fight against entropy, its scale and centralised planning vs letting the market decide.

We should all probably live and work under the Dunbar number, and allow markets to find where value is created.

I see ledgers as enabling that. The supply chain will set us free.

Actually, SCRUM was designed to make software dev teams less dependant on management. The problem you describe arose when consultancies decided that this is something that can be wrapped in a powerpoint lsidedeck and sold as "more results faster" to top management for $$$.

That being said, I do not think from your description you have experienced either SCRUM nor Agile.

Your experience is not about Scrum, but about a poorly implemented management: the process or tools proposed by Scrum (or Agile) is there to help the team, and allow to do, make their magic, not to micro-manage and assign tasks. Your previous team clearly failed at it, or we should say it succeeded at using a trending keyword to make their own agenda.

Your new team example doesn't seem much better to me: even-though the freedom you like is what should be, the lack of process can't work in any reasonable even middle-size team. The process is not about slowing you down or giving power to management: it should be there to help you as a team member keep the vision and target, and sharing. How would you know how to collaborate with others on the team if you don't have any way to know what they are doing or how would you improve your creativity if you don't have any feedback on what you are doing?

I think the goal of scrum is exactly what you are striving for: to only have the end result count. If you can achieve this without a process, that's great. However, that puts a big responsibility on the developer: you need to weigh development effort against business benefits and really try to understand the customer. If you are up for it and capable of it, that's great, then you don't need scrum or any framework. You are then the owner, period. However, in my experience, most developers do not really care about the business side of things. Also there expertise is often not in prioritizing development efforts to maximize business value. So I can completely understand what you are saying, but most developers are not you (in my experience) and they do not naturally own the things they create.

Sounds like zombie scrum. A good scrum team will be self-driven. Micro-management from external sources is an anti-pattern and usually means you have a poor scrum master who doesn't understand that their job is to protect their team.

> in my new company, where we do not have any process at all, just a common goal. Instead of standups, the team gathers for a coffee in the morning. If I want to spend 3 days learning a new framework that might do the product good, nobody cares. The only thing that counts is the endresult. That means we are beating the product into submission until its good, even if it means rewriting the thing three times and missing deadlines. So no more Scrum for me. Never.

I love this. Mind sharing the name of the company?

> If I develop something, I am the owner.

How do you, as a product owner, coming up with new features? How do you, as a product owner, prioritize one feature over other?

100% agree with this.

Amen to that

by any chance is your new company hiring?

It forces junior engineers to communicate which is great when you're still learning. Also some people really need "microtasks."

IMO: Agile produces worse software but when done correctly with a reasonable boss the work environment it produces is much simpler socially.

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