That sounds like you weren’t doing scrum right. It’s also possible I wasn’t doing it right and was doing a healthy version of it?
I’d argue that spending time on activities like scrum poker or sprint planning are actively harmful for most kinds of teams. The points games are inherently adversarial, only add value for scrum masters, and waste time that could be spent understanding requirements/business problems better. The incentives are inherently perverse and the whole exercise encourages and rewards dishonesty.
As far as no true Scotsman, I didn’t mean it like that—I don’t care if people don’t want to use scrum, but I do take light exception when people shit on it an go on to describe a process that is alien to me. Though I guess what my teen was doing was a bit more of a mix of scrum and XP.
That seems to be the exception rather than the rule in my head experience. Even still, what concrete value comes from assigning fairly arbitrary effort estimates in this fashion?
> but I do take light exception when people shit on it an go on to describe a process that is alien to me
Respectfully, I’ve seen a bunch of scrum implementations and attempts in that direction and they have a lot of overlapping pathologies. I’ve also gone to the source material. IMHO scrum simply wastes time on meetings that give a false sense of visibility and create a lot of negative incentives. For those costs, I’ve never seen a return that was worth the trade off.
It sounds very much like you were doing some flavor of XP with a few scrum meetings sprinkled in. This isn’t the process scrum evangelists and consultants are pushing. But I’d still argue that most story pointing meetings are wasteful.
I actually don’t disagree that story-pointing feels like a waste of time, but I do find it useful to talk about what’s involved in a task and figure out how long is might take. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want a rough idea of when something will be delivered, mostly so that they are able to plan themselves. Of course, it all depends on endless variables as to how much process a company needs. In larger companies with multiple teams, I strongly believe in self-organizing teams with a well-defined point of contact and freedom to implement as much or as little process as they want.
Edited to fix horrendous typo as a result of typing on my phone. I likely didn’t catch them all.
When devs overestimate they then tend to take the extra time to overengineer the solution, and when they underestimate they tend to take on technical debt to make the very arbitrary deadline.
This sounds counter-intuitive, but I’ve found in many teams the value of story pointing is to instigate healthy conversations about requirements and surface assumptions in a team that might be reticent to engage in those kinds of conversations naturally. The actual point values are probably the least important outcome - any inaccuracies tend to average out over time anyway.
I’ve gone in to many teams in my career where “planning” amounts to 1-liner tickets describing a month’s worth of work, and the team has a few dozen of these in the backlog. Conversations about what is actually involved in delivery don’t happen, and execution is chaotic because everyone has a different understanding about what we’re building.
This sounds like a dysfunctional team because it is. A surprising number of teams are dysfunctional, and many of these frameworks and tools come out of attempts to solve for dysfunction.
In these teams trust and morale tends to be low. The abstraction of story points (and associating them with complexity, not time) opens the door to having conversations about what the work actually is rather than how long everyone will take to do it.
It’s a lot easier to hear “why do you think this is a 5-pointer instead of a 3-pointer” instead of “why do you think this will take 5 weeks, I think it should only take 3.”
Scrum isn’t a universally-applicable tool, and introducing story points without also leveraging their ability to stimulate conversations about the work is a waste of time, but applied well they can help break through to teams that aren’t ready (or don’t have the muscle memory,) to have these conversations without some kind of trigger.
My team asked for this. I dont know why they need it but apparently it helps them understand how much work theyre agreeing (and committing to shipping) in a sprint.
I think if you have a good grasp on what each issue will entail, you dont really need it but if youre less experienced maybe it helps?
Similar to misses, we don't really get much from shipping on that cadence either, other than progress and building confidence in upper management to base their timelines on us delivering what we expect.
(that convo can be had on slack, btw, just like standups.)
the problem is "scrum masters" waiting to refine/reject stories during refinement (or not refining at all), or engineers not updating their cards frequently enough, or nobody guarding the backlog and allowing anyone to dump stuff into it. when these things happen, you get three-hour-plus-long sprint planning that wastes everyone's time
the other thing I absolutely hate are capital-r-Retros. retros are supposed to be the meeting that everyone looks forward to, but they often get skipped because it's an hour of people sharing platitudes because the room isn't safe enough to REALLY say what you feel. if i ran retros, they would be at a nearby pub or chill restaurant, over beverages and food, with no real structure other than "at some point we should talk about how this week went."
Otherwise (and I’m forgetting which thread I’m in here so maybe repeating myself), I have experienced incredibly valuable retros. They were structured but still fun.
And very much agree with the first paragraph. I also agree it could just be done on Slack, but I personally like having a daily meeting where I get to see my team all together… so long as that meeting is short (max 5 mins on a good day).