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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

The problem with any system is that people try to enforce it, military style. In my previous job, we did scrum, but not too strict. We had two week cycles, not-too-strict deadlines (most of the time) etc. If I finished my task early, I was free to pick up tasks from the planned list, without having to get permission from my manager. We also didn't agonize over story points, retrospective etc. We did it light hearted and quick. The only thing we religiously followed was daily, quick 15 min stand-ups. Everything else was flexible.

My current job is the opposite. Some tasks take 15 minutes of discussion (no, they aren't complex tasks) with people debating whether it is worth 5 points or 8. It is just tiring and pointless. And retro - gawd, I hate those. There are all kinds of stupid shit (people using references from music, movies etc, trying to make it "fun" and "hip"). I can't bring other tasks into the sprint, even if I finished all my current tasks, without my manager's permission. And on and on.

I was thinking the other day why this is so painful and awkward. I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses, with pretty graphs describing "velocity" and other buzzwords. So he has to do all kinds of jugglery to appear competent to his bosses and not alienate the team at the same time.

All of this could be avoided by treating the team as adults, instead of trying to "processify" or quantify everything.

However hard we try, human beings can't be slotted neatly into buckets nor can they be precisely quantified. However hard we try, estimating software projects will never be an exact science.

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> instead of trying to "processify"

A cause of this problem is when people are worried about what happens when they say "erm, I don't know how to do this cleanly" and so they want the "how" to be defined far far in advance. Solving this requires a mix of

A. Identifying those activities that will genuinely make people's lives easier if they have a process and designing those processes to be meaningful and low-burden. Those activities will vary based on team members individual peeves and affinities.

B. Creating clear lines of communication for how and whom to ask for help. This often means more clear naming of responsibilities.

C. Ensuring there is enough slack time for people to be able to help each other out.

D. Creating trust in the team that asking for help won't lead people to question if you are fit to do your job.

> quantify everything

Many times, this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Also goes hand in hand with Goodhart's Law.

" I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses". I wonder how widespread this is.. Certainly that's exactly what I experienced at a previous workplace, and worse than that, people's performance was judged on whether they'd done exactly the "right" stories in a 2 week sprint. Rather than thinking about developing software, people were working out how to game the system to ensure their metrics were good. I cannot see how this can have done the employer any good. I've now moved jobs, to a place that's far more Kanban, and if mid-story we encounter bugs that need fixing, or opportunities to improve something, or something else useful that piques our fancy, then as long as the whole team agree and our overarching goals are being worked toward , we can work naturally, rather than rigidly.

Interesting, I had a very similar experience in the past.

I think we just were part of a software factory that is not necessarily bad, it's just a different approach to work. It's much more convenient for a manager to just apply "standard" principles (scrum, 2 weeks, story points, velocity, etc. like a mantra) rather than innovating at this risk of being wrong, difficult, etc.

Too much bureaucracy is not good, maybe that was the purpose of this article. The more you have it, the more difficult it becomes to get out of it, to innovate, etc.

Agreed on the kind of religious adherence which can make the process feels a bit like..a staged show? Stifling instead of open discussion?

"Metrics" though drive when something might be delivered which triggers marketing spend, hiring requirements and so on. It says "we're working on this now and that next" which drives all kinds of internal storytelling about priorities and cascades down (or up?) into quarterly calls.

How do you do it otherwise without having ipod summers?

You set up long term team based goals (OKR's, Objectives and Key Results) and then evaluate how well those goals were achieved. It isn't 100% accurate or fair, but neither are Scrum burndown charts.

And how would you ship product against an OKR and manage spend for the marketing to support the launch?

Can you link me or someone else link me what you would consider the "ultimate kanban guide"?

I work in an environment that had no project management tools or methods being used other than emails and I've finally gotten buy in on Kanban and I want to make sure I guide my team properly.

Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sundén is a good introduction. In this book, the guiding principles of Kanban are presented almost like parables as the authors introduce you to their fictional team "Kabaneros".

Thank you I will look into it!

Kniberg has written extensively about agile practices, and this one talks a lot about Kanban:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A32O00Q/ref=dbs_a_def_r...

Although I think he ended up with something more Scrum-like later at Spotify.

He also has lots of good videos about broader team organization (Tribes etc.) that I found useful for conveying some of these ideas to my non-technical peers.

> whether they'd done exactly the "right" stories in a 2 week sprint

Not only that, but if anything else comes up during the "sprint", you're expected to address it while still finishing everything that you (involuntarily) "committed" to during sprint planning.

WE committed. We made these commitments as a team. If you can't fulfill what has been committed to by the team, then we as a team have to have a discussion about that. I'll put the meeting for next Monday on everyone's outlook.

I've never had a more visceral reaction to a comment.

Thanks, I hate it.

I'm triggered.

Estimates are not commitments. I know young devs are preyed upon, but people can't be pushovers in the workplace. It's really detrimental to all, so we need to support reason above rituals and rigid processes.

I realize your experience is correct but the irony is that Scrum itself doesn't require that nothing else comes up during a sprint. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/expedite-handling-unpla...

Very widespread. If you're working for a non-startup, non-FAANG-tier company, expect metrics to trump all other concerns.

As a manager, we have been incentivized to game this system exactly as you describe, both from my end and my devs end. Moving to a company which only cares about delivered software instead of metrics saved my soul.

The problem here this is only soul-crushing for the competent.

The purpose of metrics is to be something to game.

Now you do need don't to anything illegal policies in place, and you might have a [unwritten] moral code of what you can't do. However the purpose is to game the metrics. For all the discussion that follows I'm going to assume we are within these limits.

If the boss wants profit margin as a metric, then you need to figure out how to do things cheaper, and how to get more sales, or higher value sales or some such, and sometimes get something off the books. Note that this last is why smart investors always ask about the bottom line - because the rules of what you can hide from the bottom line are strict enough that the metrics cannot be gamed to your disadvantage. That said off the books is sometimes a useful thing to have - sometimes you know you need to do something hard and so you need to leave an approved way to hide specific things in plain sight.

The problem is most developer metrics are things where gaming the metric isn't good for the company.

"When a measure becomes a target, it seizes to become a good measure." - Some guy

Ceases*

Marilyn Strathern

> The problem is most developer metrics are things where gaming the metric isn't good for the company.

This is a lesson more managers need to learn. You don't give engineers a metric to game, they'll run circles around your silly numbers.

My favourite anecdote about this:

I was a consultant for a multinational corp. The Natives had their bonus targets tied to "amount of open bugs at $date".

What did they do? At $date-1 the natives assigned all their open issues to me, a poor lonely consultant - who was outside of the bonus structure.

...and at $date+1 they grabbed their issues back, bonus objectives met :D

> I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses, with pretty graphs describing "velocity" and other buzzwords.

You've discovered the secret of Agile in the corporate workplace: that the key takeaways, as far as the enterprise is concerned, are not finding better ways to develop software and better customer-developer relations. It's all about trackability, measurement, and metrics, because everything is. Trackability and measurement enable key decision makers to make accurate budgeting and execution plans and there is literally nothing else for key decision makers. Therefore, it makes less of a difference what you output than that it was properly planned for, tracked, and measured and that it hits organizational KPIs. That's why nobody cares that Scrum is a giant productivity suck. Code could be written faster, but that's not writing it properly.

Agile in the enterprise is a game of Mornington Crescent. The goal is not to foster the things advocated in the Agile Manifesto. It's to make it look like the company is fostering those things, while actually promoting the same Taylorist values corporations have always loved (and workers hated).

Agile in the enterprise is a game of Mornington Crescent.

That's probably the best description of "agile in the enterprise" I've ever read.

Almost:

"Interspersed with the turns is h̶u̶m̶o̶r̶o̶u̶s̶ 𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 discussion among the panelists and host regarding the rules and legality of each move, as well as the strategy the panelists are using. The actual aim of the g̶a̶m̶e̶ 𝗰𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘆 is to e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶t̶a̶i̶n̶ 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲 the other participants and listeners with a̶m̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 discussion of the fictional rules and strategies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

Funny, retros are the one thing I like. If you can get a team to honestly say what went well and what went bad, and the step that can be taken to improve, every two weeks, with some light follow up. In 6 - 12 months, you can turn a flaming wreck of a project into something that resembles best practice.

I have do it as a consultant. I have taken a project on life support that they were gonna cancel, regardless of our performance, and resurrected it so hard they actually decided to keep it. We changed their minds

The most effective tool was retros. I dislike agile in all other aspects, and do not use story points. Retros are the best bit! It's the core part of the learning loop.

I learnt retros from Google. Big tech does retros. Its honestly magic when done well.

Retros are great iff there is team empowered to actually meaningfully change stuff. I've been in places where everyone agrees that something sucks but there is no actual way to change it. Then retros turn into an impotent bitching session... no thanks.

> debating whether it is worth 5 points are 8

I'm baffled by this behavior. If you know it is the next most important thing, why do you care? What would it change in your behavior if it is a 5 vs and 8? If you are looking at a task that you would choose not to do if it were an 8 but choose to do if it were a 5, then you probably look for something that is more important to work on.

I think you are right that much of that is driven by managers looking for metrics, but unless they understand what the metrics mean it is pointless.

I think there's value in that debate (within reason) even as a developer. If Alice thinks a task is worth 5, and Bob thinks it's worth 8, then there's a good chance one of them knows something the other does not. Is Bob aware of some hidden complexity that bumps it up 3 points? Or is Alice familiar with a convenient library that solves exactly that complexity? Planning poker is a convenient time to get that knowledge out into the open.

Again, this is all within reason, and if it takes 15 minutes on every ticket, the team should probably work on their communication skills.

> there's a good chance one of them knows something the other does not

Or that the assignment of points is arbitrary and imprecise and that different people have different ways of making up numbers.

Exactly this. It's probably not an accident that one of those numbers is half of 10 (and the number of fingers on one hand) – a common made-up number for everybody – and the other is 2^3 – a common made-up number for programmers.

I've always done planning poker with the Fibonacci sequence - 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. The idea being that the more complicated the task, the harder it is to estimate accurately.

Why is story point estimation tied to fibonacci sequence? Two generations of managers at my previous employment thought this way. It just seems so arbitrary to me.

The closer the numbers are together the more time is wasted trying to be exact about them. Fib helps reduce the amount of back and forth. If you need to guess how much something weighs and your options are 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14.....100, you are going to have a lot harder time achieving consensus than if you asks "Is it heavier or lighter than a breadbox?"

At least that is the idea.

First, the more difficult a task is, the more inherent difficulty there will be in "accurately" estimating the difficulty of the task. Fibonacci is used to represent the inherent lack of accuracy in more difficult tasks, since the numbers get _very_ far from each other as they go up the scale.

Second, the numbers _are_ arbitrary. Completely, 100% arbitrary. It's a _relative_ difficulty scale. Say you've got 3 tasks - A, B, and C. A and B are approximately as hard as each other, they're 1 story point. C is more difficult than either one - it gets 2 points. That's it. Story points are not, and should not be used as, a unit of measurement. The biggest utility is to identify big, scary tasks with lots of unknown factors.

The fact that they are _numbers_ is what tricks so many teams/PMs/management/etc into thinking that story points are more meaningful than they were ever supposed to be. Incidentally, this is also why some planning poker teams use t-shirt sizing (S,M,L,XL,XXL, etc). No numbers means people are less tempted to punch them into a spreadsheet while deluding themselves into believing that showing numbers going down is the same thing as "showing progress".

The original reason was if you broke a task down into 2 subtasks it would still conform to your story point scale (a 21 becomes a 13 and 8, etc.)

My experience is that in well-running teams, devs are usually pretty aligned what these numbers mean. A difference in proposed points for some task does then usually mean there's a discrepancy in knowledge about it.

As for its usefulness: You of course don't have to necessarily poker to get these discrepancies, but it's a pretty effective way of going about it, I'd say.

Everyone is correct in this thread. The stimulation of discussion is useful, and numbers are arbitrary.

Instead of worrying about 5 vs 8 though, the team should be discussing relative difficulty: is story B easier/more difficult/complex than story A? And then ranking stories based on the relative difficulty of each other.

Story points can then be derived based on that ranking, if the team chooses. They're useful for being applied to velocity calculation, and also helpful when picking up a story to work on (maybe a bad idea to start an 8 pointer on a Friday).

(I have a SM cert, working as a TPM. I applying Agile principles to teams, but modified to how they want to work and be most effective. No militant Scrum here.)

That for sure seems useful. "Hey Sally, you think B is harder than A. Why do you think it's hard?" "Hey Bob, you disagreed with Sally and think B is easier, why is that?"...is very likely to lead to a useful conversation in terms of everyone getting in sync and may well lead to hidden information being brought out into the open, which is a good thing. In general I think relative value/preference type conversations tend to reveal a lot.

Attention! Discussing story points is no longer allowed during planning. After voting, teams are to discuss relative story points, swapping points between each two story. This is expected to increase efficiency and coherence. Rule enforcement commencing beginning of next month after the first weekend.

My team doesn't really argue about points next to each other (on the Fibonacci scale) anymore, we just pick by majority and move on.

The conversation is meaningful when it's about 3 vs 8 because exactly as you say, there probably is some hidden complexity not everyone knows about, or sometimes some work has already been done or there's a framework feature that makes it easier than it seems.

But 2 vs 3 or 5 vs 8... this is explicitly designed to be an imprecise number, so let's not waste our time debating which one to choose.

Or Alice is more familiar with that section of the code and would move more quickly in there and Bob would be doing more learning along the way.

Quick discussion of the differences is useful, but 15 minutes is ridiculous. Just take the higher value and move on. Eventually you’ll baseline at slightly more points per sprint on average, but they are imaginary numbers anyway and not really comparable across teams.

If you will do something different with a 5 than with an 8 then yes. If not, then the ambiguities you describe will be worked out when you do the work. It is just a vanity metrics if the results doesn't change what you work on next. It seems important but it has no actual bearing on the teams sequencing of the work.

If Bob had a plan for doing the work that didn't involve Alice's library, there's a good chance he would have just jumped straight in to implementation without talking to anyone, and maybe the library wouldn't have come up until code review (if at all). By identifying the complexity mismatch ahead of time, they saved 3 points worth of effort. This doesn't affect sequencing at all, but still seems valuable to me.

My team has a rule that if your Fibonacci point estimates are within one of a given unit, you just accept that estimate with no discussion - so if I think a story is a 3, and others think 5 and 8, we’ll take the 5 and move on. I think it gives a good balance of discouraging hair splitting and surfacing cases where having more discussion is actually valuable.

Sometimes importance is related to size. Points are arbitrary, but lets assume that on average a developer will work the entire sprint on an 8 point task. The PM might decide that feature is not worth the time investment in that sprint, if they could instead get 2 smaller features out the door, or some bug fixed - they might prefer to deliver that to stakeholders.

That's why there's even a velocity expressed in points, like the tasks - it's the PM's budget to work with. So 5 points or 8 doesn't change the work you have to do as an engineer, but it changes the number of things a PM will put on the team's plate in the next sprint, and the points force them to make trade-offs, otherwise they'll insist that the bug, the small feature and the large feature are all high priority and have to be delivered in the next sprint.

I'm not justifying the 15 minute time investment for sizing, that is clearly way too much time, I'm only highlighting that in scrum, as an engineer, you don't necessarily know or decide what the next most important thing to work on is. That's the PM's job.

Bugs get resolved desk-side five minutes after being reported and pushed through on PRs that have 89% test coverage (still green!). Developer is a cowboy hero! The good thing is: you always get more bugs like this so everyone gets a chance to be a hero.

Must be nice. I've yet to see that happen at 'big tech' companies.

My last "team" was constantly paralyzed by this. The scrum master would go around and everyone had to vote on the number of points they thought a story was, which then led to extended debate. Of course, it can always be worse...near the end, they tried some idiotic thing called "planning poker".

Exactly. Managers look for metrics and point and velocity are what they use.

Well anyway, managers in my current company are dumber than second coat of paint and I inflate points.

Metrics are not bad. Story points and velocity are usually bad metrics though.

It's not a coincidence the consultancy sector uses scrum. They get paid for their output, usually by the hour, and scrum measures output.

If a consultant implements a load of useless features that make a product worse, but do so very quickly, then that's a great success for them. It's not fundamentally different from rewarding developers for the number of lines of code they write.

A couple things:

1. Sometimes your team needs to give an estimate of when it will deliver a feature. The idea of pointing in Scrum is that you establish a velocity, which lets you get a feel for how long it's going to take to deliver a given piece of work.

2. Sometimes your team needs to make trade-offs, and often the right lens here is ROI. You can't estimate ROI if you don't estimate the I. (Although I believe agile tends to somewhat overrate the usefulness of the ROI lens.)

3. In the absence of 1 or 2, the act of pointing can help to catch the case where you miss a piece of complexity; if someone thinks it's 8 and everyone else is a 5, then maybe they are aware of some gnarly code that everyone else has forgotten?

I'm not arguing in favor of discussing each story to death, just making a more general justification for the practice. If you never need to do 1 or 2, then maybe pointing isn't going to be useful for your team at this time -- and that's OK too.

I'm sure in some cases this is just driven by managers needing metrics to measure their teams by, but the above is an attempt to suggest some reasons that the teams themselves might find the practice useful.

Neither "points" nor "velocity" appears in the scrum guide.

Sure, like I said, you don't need to do it if you don't get value from it.

I'm just giving some examples of ways that some Scrum teams do get value from the practice.

My last job, we each had a minimum required individual velocity in our weekly sprints. That velocity score was the same if you were a junior or a senior. So in that case convincing the team it was an 8 could mean the difference between keeping your job or not. It was the most soul destroying, stressful job I have ever had. The worst was the Rockstar programmers not seeming to grasp that by reducing the points total on a hard ticket they were dooming their teammates. It lead to everything you can imagine, tickets implemented as fast as possible so they met the letter of the ticket but crashed on anything not defined as the team raced to meet their velocity. Massive unpaid overtime and burnout. Constant crashes in production. Races to claim the 'easy' tickets, and sandbagging. Eventually culminating in 8 of 12 devs quitting in an 8 month window including all seniors. My new job is so much better.

Oh god, this perfectly describes the company I just quit. They went from using Trello, allowing us to choose what to work on, loosely setting story points and ... that was it.

Then they decided they needed the metrics on everything, so they switched to JIRA, started doing retros, setting strict points on tasks(reprimanded in retros if you messed up), using burndown charts to reprimand even more, and giving the product manager the power to dictate what I work on and in what order.

It went from being a great company to work at, to a company I ran away from. I have half a mind to send this thread over to them.

No need. Abusers won't listen in the first place.

> My current job is the opposite. Some tasks take 15 minutes of discussion (no, they aren't complex tasks) with people debating whether it is worth 5 points or 8. It is just tiring and pointless.

That was my last gig. The whole organization eventually just collapsed under the increasing load of being "Agile".

At my work, when one of us gets too into the details of pointing, estimation, or process we usually realize, stop, and say "sorry--I was being a Scrumbag"

> I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses, with pretty graphs describing "velocity" and other buzzwords.

This is a thing that's pretty key to Scrum: velocity can't be used to compare teams. It is easy to misuse though. I would start every meeting I were in with "these points measures cannot be used to measure performance between teams."

I find "velocity" to be almost completely useless, both in principle and in practice. It's not only useless for comparing teams, it's useless for comparing the same team over time if anything that affects "velocity" changes: the team composition, the length of the iterations, the nature of the tasks being worked on, etc. Now, how often have any of us worked on a project where at least one of those things didn't change, and sometimes fairly frequently?

I mean, just the difference in an iteration with a couple of people on PTO, or a holiday or two intruding into it, will throw the numbers off. Now factor in all of the other fuzziness that's inherent in the process... yeah, no. Don't bother trying to calculate or track "velocity". You'd probably get better results from Tarot cards or animal entrails.

I too find velocity to be one of the dumbest aspects of Agile. It takes the stupid of story points and doubles down on uselessness and arbitrariness.

Velocity in physical terms is an instantaneous measure. It's the same in Agile, you've done X things in Y time. But that ignores the context of those X tasks and the context of Y time.

The X+1 task might turn out more difficult or have some other challenge that makes it take longer. Time keeps passing so at time Y+2 the velocity measurement is lower than before. Now all the PMs and other team members jump in demanding answers which now makes the task take even longer.

As you mention, some span of time can see team members out or unavailable. So the velocity is "low" but rarely is that context captured or bubbled up the management chain. So your team has "low velocity" which ends up generating worthless meetings, bad reviews, or all sorts of problems.

> I too find velocity to be one of the dumbest aspects of Agile

It's not part of Agile. It's specific to Scrum.

I've seen "story points" be totally useless over time on teams where "number of tickets delivered per week" was remarkably stable. But people don't like using that for some reason.

If you do that you can actually very easily switch to Kanban methinks. In Kanban you sort of have to size all work to be about (!) the same size so that you can make accurate enough predictions for your lead time and cycle time. That only really works if all work items are about the same size though, otherwise you get too many outliers from your statistics.

I've found that most Product Owners really care about predictability and less about actual estimates. They care that if you say you're gonna finish something by the end of the sprint, much more often than not, you will. Estimates and velocity and such things are just means to the end of trying to figure out which items are reasonable to take into a sprint together.

If your Product person knows that they can throw 10 "random" (but currently most wanted by stakeholders) work items into a "sprint" and 9 times out of 10 you will actually finish all of those, they're probably gonna be very very happy as they won't have to explain delays over and over again on their end.

> I've seen "story points" be totally useless over time on teams where "number of tickets delivered per week" was remarkably stable. But people don't like using that for some reason.

I don't see how this can be the case. If each ticket is estimated to be about the same size, and it sounds as though they should be, then if you're doing say 5 tickets a week, 10 a sprint, and they're all about the same size then each ticket you could say is 5 points, and you're doing 50 points a sprint.

That's probably pointless (hah) if they are all the same size; ticket sizing is more for if you have tasks of different sizes and you're trying to roughly combine them into something you can predictably deliver.

But if you're at a stage when your delivery is already this predictable, you may not need to use story points particularly. If it's mandated for some silly reason then you could use the above method to bat it away quickly!

We have sprint retros and generally find them valuable. I’m curious how one would even go about incorporating music and movies into a sprint retro? That does sound painful.

I think they mean when your retro board has a theme; I've seen various themes applied successfully i.e. sailboat:https://metroretro.io/templates/the-sailboat-retrospective

Is it just me or does this look great for a 2nd grade class.

It sort of betrays how people think of tech nerds. :)

We do it at my company/in my team. It's OK, come on, it's not that bad.

It's also a way for our team to get together and talk BS, have a little bit of fun etc.

Get on the call and suck your thumb to fit in.

It depends on your team.

I have teams that respond well to it. People like me, who work in metaphors and abstractions, respond well to it.

It's amazing how infantilized this industry has become during my short 10 year career. I'm so thankful I switched to product and don't have to deal with this BS anymore.

... that's usually the people that try to bring this stuff in...

As a former engineer who used to deal with the bone-crushing tedium of fundamentalist Scrum, I have enough empathy for my team to not force this crap on them. I keep the process light, communicate a lot, and treat them like adults.

> I keep the process light, communicate a lot, and treat them like adults.

That sounds like fundamentalist Scrum.

> The only thing we religiously followed was daily, quick 15 min stand-ups.

One of the worst parts of scrum in my opinion. Even if it's a "quick" 15 minutes (which in my experience it rarely ever is), the forced context switch ends up wasting more than 15 minutes of productive time every day.

> In my previous job, we did scrum, but not too strict. We had two week cycles, not-too-strict deadlines (most of the time) etc. If I finished my task early, I was free to pick up tasks from the planned list, without having to get permission from my manager. We also didn't agonize over story points, retrospective etc. We did it light hearted and quick. The only thing we religiously followed was daily, quick 15 min stand-ups. Everything else was flexible.

This is exactly how I've seen it run with success at several different companies (including how I run it).

In my mind, the most important value of Scrum is having a cadence to give people reasonable timeframes to think in AND ensure that a variety of different conversations happen frequently enough (discovery, planning, prioritization, execution).

----

> And retro - gawd, I hate those.

It sounds like you hate these because you aren't actually empowered to make meaningful change within your team.

We've found retros are one of our most important rituals. They help us identify risks, process, and team issues; often while they're still small. We quickly work those in.

When I ran Engineering for a startup, this is roughly how we did things as well. If a disagreement around pointing a story happened, we resolved it within seconds and usually just went with the larger size. It didn't really matter so much, since we weren't using velocity as a goal or something reported on a weekly basis. I did use it to roughly ballpark how many sprints it might take to deliver something, but that was as much story point math as I ever did and never used it to guarantee a date. I did have to fight a few battles with my CEO and other VPs around that, but, in the end, the results of mostly consistent and predicable progress with happier dev teams made those arguments moot.

We also found retrospectives to be pretty useful and each team was encouraged to find what worked for them. The result was that we had 5 teams that had some agile/scrum process, but created mechanics that worked well for them.

> I did use it to roughly ballpark how many sprints it might take to deliver something, but that was as much story point math as I ever did and never used it to guarantee a date.

This is basically how we use it. Typically, if we have a multi-sprint effort, we'll guarantee delivery in the last or second to last sprint. Anything before that and we're having conversations around scope and trade-offs we need to make to hit targets.

I've had several engineers tell me their 1.5x to 2.0x as effective as their prior roles while having better WLB.

>Some tasks take 15 minutes of discussion (no, they aren't complex tasks) with people debating whether it is worth 5 points or 8. It is just tiring and pointless.

If you're not personally responsible for deadlines on the project, it could seem pointless. But the difference might mean pushing the commitment for a feature out two weeks, which in a commercial project could be a big deal. Planning is hard: you've got to try to estimate something with incomplete information, and then reconcile differing opinions. But it's definitely not pointless.

Velocity is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of scrum. It's a key metric for long-term planning, but it's not intended to be manageable. It's also unique to the team, and not intended to be compared between teams. Many managers are not used to a metric that they don't manage, and that causes a lot (maybe most) of the bad experiences people have with poorly practiced scrum.

Presenting scrum metrics to management is definitely not scrum. That's the opposite of scrum.

A lot of places are looking for new people (even remotely), don't stay in a place that makes you miserable. You don't have to suffer for other peoples mismanagement.

Scrum is Agile, strictly enforced.

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