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Comment by TobyTheDog123 | Hacker News Reader

I also don't fully understand what "doing Kanban" means - like you, I see Kanban as a type of board rather than a method of going through said board (maybe because of a lack of understanding of process & an over-indulgence in Trello's marketing).

That being said, I would say that having a Kanban board without any sprint structure (or any attached micromeetings) would skyrocket my productivity. The two-week sprint thing is meaningless to me - in my org tickets overflow from one sprint to the next all the time, tickets get added mid-sprint, it's an utterly meaningless distinction.

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This is exactly how I feel. Then we talk about 'complexity points', explicitly not time, but then say only X of them fit into a two week fixed time window. So then overflow them (or pull new work in) as required as you say anyway, it's pointless?

Whatever the management benefit supposedly is, seems like it could be achieved with declaring current (not 'sprint'^) goals, and a filter for tickets done/progressed in a given date range?

(^Even the language is depressing: sprint, ticket, points, standup, sit down, keep moving, ...)

> in my org tickets overflow from one sprint to the next all the time, tickets get added mid-sprint

That's not Scrum then. You don't add stuff mid-sprint, that's the whole point. Unless the world is literally on fire, you don't touch the sprint content.

What's your scrum master doing when you get stuff added? It's their job to prevent it.

And if work overflows, you need to spend time grooming the tasks to manageable chunks and adjust the team velocity. You can always pick up more tasks if you run out of stuff to do.

Why do you need a "scrum master" to prevent that? Linux kernel seems to be doing just fine without them.

The real solution is of course not to have any "sprints" at all. A manageable chunk of work is a 3 to 6 month project.

Non-tech enterprise treat software engineers as children and create bad software. FAANG and adjacent companies treat software engineers more as professionals and create better software.

Linux kernel is more like Kanban than an Agile project, you can't really compare it to a project with an actual client who pays money to receive features in a timeframe. Stuff gets done when it's done and the BFDLs decide when the feature gets into the actual kernel.

Waterfall-style projects had 3 to 6 month timeframes of delivery and we all know how that goes. The result is always either out of date due to changing requirements or not what the customer wanted because there is no way to change course after the project specification was locked.

...or you spend so much time doing an exact specification that the Agile team has already delivered 3 incremental versions.

I don't see what use a "scrum master" is. That sounds like a small task for the software engineer or their real manager. There is nothing showing that heavy agile actually leads to features being developed earlier. In my experience it's the opposite as you build up heavy tech debt by micro-managing and optimizing for a 2 week return instead of the long term.

Waterfall were 1 to 2 year projects with heavy up-front administration. 3 to 6 months is well-balanced and that's what the "elite" companies and research groups tend to use. Two weeks is the current fad at non-tech enterprise.

The task of the Scrum Master is to make themselves redundant. They just make sure the team follows the structure they agreed on + runs interference for external issues.

After the team is mature enough, one of them can take the SM duties in addition to other tasks because the actual process runs without extra management.

Sounds like they were redundant from the very beginning. Those sound like small tasks for the engineers or the actual manager.

In my experience on a scrum team, the scrummaster was basically a coach. They helped deal with external issues as the other responder said, so the manager (team leader) didn't waste his time with that and could use his time dealing with team members and doing engineering work too. In my case, the scrummaster had this role for a bunch of parallel teams, not just one, so it was a full-time job for him. The org structure seemed to work very well for the type of work we were doing.

Yea, pretty often scrum masters are hired coaches that are let go when the team knows how to self-manage - or like you said - they coach multiple teams at the same time.

What qualifications does a "scrum master" have that a software engineer does not have when it comes to creating a self-managing team? The "scrum" pamphlet can be read on a lunch break and I don't think the certs even have exams.

In my experience, there's a couple: 1. The scrum master actually has a personality that facilitates talking to people both inside and outside the team, getting people to participate in meetings, etc. The software engineers do not. 2. The scrum master has time to spend on dealing with external stakeholders, coordinating between teams, etc. The team members have better things to do with their time, like write software.

Engineers communicate just fine at FAANG. I don't see why they need an agile helper in non-tech enterprise. Lawyers don't need agile, and doctors don't. There is no reason why engineers would.

The team members are too busy with agile meetings to write software. That's a more common problem.

Maybe giving the tech lead a technical secretary is a better idea if you have a lot of administration to be done.

Obviously you have some kind of axe to grind and haven't worked in a place that uses the scrum process decently. We never spent much time in agile meetings.

No, that is not obvious, more than you making money from corporate agile, which few software engineers seem to actually like. Too many meetings is one of the most common criticisms.

If the "scrum master" stopped booking meetings that should have been an e-mail, the engineers would deal with those issues with time to spare. What issues really? I don't even see how a technically weak "scrum master" could deal with any real issue in a software product.

See that's the main problem with strict scrum. Why can't you add things to the sprint mid sprint? Sometimes things come up that you didn't think of.

There's really no point being that strict. I think two week meetings/sprints are good for keeping focus and as an opportunity to agree short term priorities. But the point is to get work done, not to precisely obey scrum rules.

Depends on what the "you" is here.

If the "you" is the team, go ahead. Add anything you want, as long as you deliver what you promised in the beginning of the sprint.

If the "you" is an external person asking for a "quick job", then the default answer is "talk to the scrum master" whose default answer will be "No.". Then they can start discussing if it is so urgent and important that it can't wait 1-10 business days for the next sprint and/or small enough not to disrupt other work.

The rules are there to protect the team. If the team is willing to take ad-hoc work, nothing in the agile rules says they can't do so. The point is that nobody outside of the team can force them to take on extra work mid-sprint and disrupt their planned work.

> If the "you" is an external person asking for a "quick job", then the default answer is "talk to the scrum master" whose default answer will be "No.

I hate working with people like this. So unhelpful.

I hate being interrupted by people too, that's why I like the Scrum style of working when there is an external client (or an unruly internal one).

That's not a rule in Scrum that I'm aware of. It's an aspiration for sure since an injection implies some sort of emergency or unanticipated work. Ideally you avoid those sort of things. But if they happen it's not an issue to inject something. Constantly doing so usually means something has broken down in planning and/or quality is so bad the team is going from fire to fire.

So if we finish all of our tickets early (which is often the case because measuring complexity is impossible to do up front), we're just supposed to sit around until the sprint ends?

A scrum master? Man, I thought my team was bloated with process but the fact that role exists elsewhere means I should probably be more grateful.

Kanban is about organizing the work to be done and periodically revisiting the board to understand the work done and what’s next (which involves reprioritizing, pivoting, etc.)

Some people might debate on how active a kanban board should be.

This goes back to my original post. Is this “doing Kanban” or is this just another process using a Kanban board?

That sounds identical to how companies I've worked for "do agile". A kanban board. Every two weeks you revisit the board, see what got done, prioritise what to do next (usually by dragging it from the "backlog" to "todo" column).

Could be much worse in practice. You could have retrospects every two weeks, daily standups, messages every day from your nontechnical manager asking you for estimate markers on each of the tasks, breaking down tasks further, renaming tasks they don’t understand but other engineers do, etc.

That's the whole trick with "doing Kanban". You don't need special magic methods to do your work- just pick up a ticket and do the work, repeat forever.

I’ve fortunately never had to do Scrum other than an internship where I had no idea what was actually going on. We do almost exactly what you describe. We just take tasks off the board and we don’t have sprints.

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