All about Scrum

[original PM]

One if the biggest problems I find is the hippo issue.

Spend money and time finding out user needs?

Nah I can save us money by just telling you what everyone wants.

Once that has happened does not matter what method you use to get the software developed because it will fail because it has been developed based on the requirements of someone who will never use it.

[yetanotherbob]

"scrum" is a software engineering

While agile is a legitimate subject area in Software Engineering, scrum might be a passing fad.

Agile's major goals include good, readable, well tested, well reviewed code (refactored to achieve these properties if necessary), written with adequate communication and stakeholder engagement.
It seeks to achieve this by breaking down the work involved in delivering a project into small, possible to estimate, achievable units that have a verifiable outcome (such as what counts as "done" for a unit of work - "done" could mean your code passing a set of test cases written beforehand).

While the recommended meetings like daily stand-ups, sprint planning and retrospective might be part of it, an equally if not more important component is effective use of agile engineering tools (things like test tools - preferably automated unit/integration testing, continuous integration, issue trackers, wikis, proper source control).
The stories and tasks need to build into a coherent architecture and not be made up as they go along

religion.

It has its holy book, its priests, evangalists and rituals.

This is what sometimes makes it an ugly waste of time. Maybe the 'evangelists' have added some value by promoting the idea but in good development teams, I find developers following good agile techniques naturally. Where I found gaps, I simply put together things like test cases, source control etc. as part of my deliverables to get them started.

I have worked with some truly, truly, awful agile coaches and scrum masters.

The experience can be soul-destroying. The environment suits certain personality types - they may or may not be competent but need to be good at posturing

But those ones tend to have come from a software engineering background and are pragmatic about finding real solutions rather than committed to a particular mindset.

Makes sense as they would know what they are talking about. Agile developed as a software project management technique which is essentially a software engineering problem.

[LondonManc]

"scrum" is a software engineering religion.

It has its holy book, its priests, evangalists and rituals. If you deviate from scrum-by-the-book then you schism and start a new off-shoot explaining loudly why your version is right and everyone else is wrong.

I have worked with some truly, truly, awful agile coaches and scrum masters.

I have also worked with a vanishingly small number of excellent ones who have seriously helped to turn the software team around. But those ones tend to have come from a software engineering background and are pragmatic about finding real solutions rather than committed to a particular mindset.

Prince 2 called and wants its take on Waterfall back.

Do what works in/for your organisation. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. If there was, everything would have been offshored for cheaper by now.

[woohoo]

One of the key benefits of Agile (as in the original Agile Manifesto and so forth) is that it eliminates wasteful and irrelevant layers of middle management that muddy the waters and encourage make-work "processes" in order to make themselves seem valuable.

But when an organisation decides to adopt "Agile", the people given the job of making that happen are the very same middle managers. And they aren't about to implement a system that eliminates their roles.

So an industry has grown up around providing ready-made templates for AINO (Agile In Name Only) methodologies, along with "relevant" training packages and what have you, all of which needs to be administered by… layers of middle management.

Which is how a set of principles that began with prizing "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" has been gradually distorted and bloated into nonsense like the "Scaled Agile Framework®":

Choked on my tea when I spotted value stream on the diagram.

[NickFitz]

One of the key benefits of Agile (as in the original Agile Manifesto and so forth) is that it eliminates wasteful and irrelevant layers of middle management that muddy the waters and encourage make-work "processes" in order to make themselves seem valuable.

But when an organisation decides to adopt "Agile", the people given the job of making that happen are the very same middle managers. And they aren't about to implement a system that eliminates their roles.

So an industry has grown up around providing ready-made templates for AINO (Agile In Name Only) methodologies, along with "relevant" training packages and what have you, all of which needs to be administered by… layers of middle management.

Which is how a set of principles that began with prizing "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" has been gradually distorted and bloated into nonsense like the "Scaled Agile Framework®":

[ladymuck]

Not contractors though!? There is no safety as a contractor and FS is also getting tight so I dont buy it
Its the secret sauce we are missing here folks - Someone let me in on the recipe

I know of permie-tractors who are crap yet manage to keep their gigs because they do just enough (by copying other people's work) and tend to be in FS areas where they keep locking down spend on contractors so the managers cling on to what little resource they have. Gift of the gab and enough knowledge of key buzzwords is all the sauce you need.

[LondonPM1]

Because people read a book during their tea breaks, learn the buzzwords and lie their way into an interview. If they're convincing enough, they get the gig. They get usually three months to prove themselves after which a lot of companies CBA to find a replacement if they're tulipe. It's better if you get wind of a FS company just about to into a recruitment freeze cos once you're in, you have a job for life.

Not contractors though!? There is no safety as a contractor and FS is also getting tight so I dont buy it
Its the secret sauce we are missing here folks - Someone let me in on the recipe

[ladymuck]

Seen people on linkedin who pushed trolleys back at Asda and were bouncer at the local disco for many years and then became senior Salesforce.com recruiter. How is taht possible?

Because people read a book during their tea breaks, learn the buzzwords and lie their way into an interview. If they're convincing enough, they get the gig. They get usually three months to prove themselves after which a lot of companies CBA to find a replacement if they're tulipe. It's better if you get wind of a FS company just about to into a recruitment freeze cos once you're in, you have a job for life.

[Eirikur]

Seen people on linkedin who pushed trolleys back at Asda and were bouncer at the local disco for many years and then became senior Salesforce.com recruiter. How is taht possible?

[SimonMac]

'Scrum is soooo last year darling ..'.

"The following is a story about how we matured as an engineering team. We went from an ad-hoc process to Scrum, and used Scrum for a whole year. Scrum leveled us up as a team in terms of structure and process. But it caused major morale issues. Then we found Kanban. We implemented it and have never looked back."
https://medium.com/cto-school/ditchi...m-cd1167014a6f

Kanban is this ..


and this ..



and this ..



Simplees.

We do Scrumban now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrumban