Scrum

[Rover321]

Is anyone using Scrum for software development? - or have an opinion on it? Does anyone like it?

 

[KB]

You might enjoy this:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-02-06

Scrum is good for keeping people on track but can sometimes be an annoyance and waste of time. I am ambivalent.

 

[purbeast0]

Following scrum to a T with it's rules is kind of a waste IMO. The projects I've worked on are all ran "scrum like" and I enjoy it the best. Doing it just to say you're doing scrum is a bad idea if the process isn't helping you out. Just do what works best for your development process.

 

[Aikouka]

I think a lot of it depends on the project itself. The project that I'm currently on uses Agile, and I think it's a silly waste of time. Without getting into too much detail, it's a modernization project that has a heavy adherence to the original design. In other words, there really isn't a lot of wiggle room to move, which somewhat hampers the whole point of Agile: flexibility and adaptability. I know of other programs that use Agile, and I don't think it's a bad idea for them. Those programs are new efforts that encompass both hardware and software, which started in more of a prototype phase. So, the ability to adapt/change quickly is helpful. They're also far more organized and can get requirements and stuff out the door ahead of time where I get requirements two weeks before formal testing!

In my case, the scrum implementation is a bit too meeting-heavy, and worst off, they tend to tie up all of the personnel for way too long. During a sprint planning meeting the other week, we had about 10 people tied up for around 2.5 hours, which means we used up 25 hours worth of personnel time. Now, that's not a bad thing if the hours are used well, but most people just sit there with no input the majority of the time.

 

[Cogman]

IMO, scrum is snake oil. In my time, we've tried implementing various levels of scrum from super strict to semi strict. Ultimately, it accomplishes very little.

If you need to make promises on deliverable, then whatever, it can sort of help you plan things out. However, the inflexibility of the iteration cycle really just ends up making you slower and doesn't add anything to the ability to promise long term deliverables. If you finish your iteration early, you end up leaking in things. If major issues or initiatives come up, you end up leaking in things.

And then the meetings... I just... yeah... huge wastes of time. I have never seen the value in almost any of the scrum meetings. Daily standup? Umm, ok, so everyone can keep track of what everyone else is doing? Why do we need to waste each other's time when we could honestly email out everything in less time and it can be ignored just as fast.

Retrospectives? pointless. When things are going well people are just saying things because nobody wants to sit and stare at each other for the hour... things that can actually hurt the team. When things are going poorly, well often real solutions aren't found in the retro. Even real problems just aren't really addressed. It just ends up starting new team initiatives which, frankly, live for a short while and then just die off as the team falls right back into the same groove. It is ultimately disrupting and annoying without being hugely beneficial.

And then there are the millions of other meetings which just ultimately waste time. Grooming, planning, weighing, etc. I've never felt like these meetings have really made me more productive, but I have constantly felt interrupted and slowed down because I spend 4 hours of the day talking about what I can do for the next 4 hours of the day.

My team has ultimately abandoned 90% of scrum. We do tri weekly standups. We have switched to a "kanban" style of workflow where high priority things move to the top and low priority things sink to the bottom. Devs are allowed to paydown tech debt, etc, because we have a lot of it from too many years of Scrum and feature grinding. Cases are triaged by non-devs first before getting to the devs, this has saved SO much time. We have abandoned the illusion of trying to figure out points or timing for cases because, well, that was a pointless and futile exercise that yielded little benefits. We still retro, but, the system can't be perfect

And I feel like our product has never moved faster than it is now. We have moved from "lets everyone spend hours wasting time" to "coordinate with yourselves and get stuff done. Don't waste everyone's time with pointless crap". Amazing how productive you can be when you don't spend all your time trying to figure out how to be productive.

 

[purbeast0]

Daily standups are great on small teams. And if you're doing them right, they should take no longer than 5 minutes excluding the tailgate, if there is one, which not everyone needs to stick around for. The problem is that a lot of teams do them wrong. The previous project I was on we had literally 20+ people in daily standups and they took like 15-20 minutes. Now that was a huge waste of time. But in smaller teams (mine is 6 right now) it's great and at least once a week a quicker solution is found due to a discussion that comes up in the standup.