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Comment by darreninthenet | Hacker News Reader

This is where a decent Scrum Master or Agile Coach makes such a massive difference... I've seen what you're describing so many times and it's a simple fix to get people to stop focusing on what they've done and to instead focus on what the team needs to do (ie focus on work not yet complete for the team and not what on the individual has done/will do)

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Good in theory

In practice, any standup format where developers show up and basically perform to some standards set by a “master” or “coach” is kind of doomed to feel a little bit like a circus show.

The problem is the existence of someone else running the show in these meetings. The best standup I’ve had were those run by the engineers themselves. Adding a “coach” or “master” just makes everything worse unless the team is really bad at communicating with each other, in which case you have bigger problems.

Lord knows what people are calling coaching these days. But if they're actually coaching, then yes, getting the team to run the meeting was exactly my goal when I did that kind of work.

But that can be tricky. The biggest issue is to train managers to not make it about the manager. For that, an external coach is especially helpful, because it's the rare engineer who can sit their boss down and say, "Look, you're destroying this meeting. How about you not show up for the next two weeks, and then optionally show up but never speak for a month after that?"

But even once you've created a space where power doesn't distort everything, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. People who talk too much or too little. People are unkind, rude, cutting, or outright mean. People who talk about the wrong things. People who don't even know what to do if there isn't a manager around to try to please.

The truth is that for most people in the industry, their median meeting is bad. People with shorter careers may never have experienced a good meeting. So expecting them to just figure out how to have an excellent meeting every day is asking a lot. Especially a stand-up, which has pretty sharp constraints. If a team already knows or quickly figures it out, great. But a coach can really help.

This would be the goal of a decent coach, to ultimately not be needed by the team you're working with (ie they run things by themselves)

> whenever agile project fail, agile shaman say "you didn't do agile right!" grug note this awfully convenient for agile shaman, ask more shiney rock better agile train young grugs on agile, danger!

pure marxism has never tried! if only we try the pure version it will work better! Marx had some good idea, communism stinks. Agile manifesto has good ideas Agile stinks. Maybe not as bad, but let's move on

I've found a direct correlation that the more closely a workplace conformed to the Agile manifesto, the better it was to work in. It absolutely does work in practice, and where it doesn't work I have always found specific, actionable places where they were doing it wrong. At some point you do have to actually spend 5 minutes to try to understand and follow the methodology - I don't think there's any methodology that claims you can ignore everything it tells you, do the oppsite of what it says half the time, and it will still improve your organisation.

(Unfortunately I haven't found any correlation between how much an employer talks about Agile and how closely they actually follow it)

I know you're being somewhat flippant but if agile shaman blame team for not doing agile right team should throw agile shaman off nearest cliff and find somebody who's not doing that job as some kind of dodge... too many self declared agile coaches and scrum masters out there who have no idea what they're doing - it usually starts because the organisation gets their first feed of them and agile through a consultancy who just tells them what they want to hear rather than they reality, and the senior management usually can't get out of that headspace.

Scrum works best if you can find a true Scotsman to be the Scrum Master.

I snorted...stealing that line for future use :-) You win the interwebz for today :-D

All those people do is make me disgruntled knowing it's someone's _job_ to run this bullshit circus. Automate the lot of it away, don't make it someone's career.

People care and should care about what they get rewarded for. If promotions/raises/bonuses are based on the manager's view of your personal work, as is the case at most companies, then that is exactly what a sane person should focus on. Removing the manager from the standup or adding another layer of a Scrum Master won't change that but merely change how they get that same information. Standup at least provides an equal opportunity for everyone to sell themselves in those cases.

So people with better communication skills would get rewarded more than people contributing more on the actual delivery side?

He's not suggesting that's how it should work, he's saying that's how it does work at most places. It's my experience too.

As the other comment said I'm simply noting the unfortunately reality that what matters is rarely actual delivery. Trying to avoid that reality won't make things more tied to delivery but simply more opaque as to what they're tied to.

There's exceptions but in my experience those teams don't bother with these types of deep discussions on process. The process is somewhat irrelevant since the expectations are fairly clear and what they will be measured on is also fairly clear.

If the SM is seen as or becomes a layer between the team and management, they aren't doing their job correctly

To paraphrase: "The 3 questions now considered harmful"

It wasn't until 2020 that the 3 questions were dropped from the scrum guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/going-beyond-three-ques...)

Personally, I think the biggest difference is just anyone on a team who is empowered and is thinking deeply about process is the key.

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