Reply to: All about Scrum

[WTFH]

Fourth bullet point in the article I posted above: "Scrum isn’t an acronym and isn’t spelt SCRUM"

If you've ever heard a ref, he doesn't say "scrum", he says "SCRUM!"

[NickFitz]

There’s a company in Twickenham looking for a few SCRUM masters. Most of their workers are foreign but weren’t good enough to get work where they are from.

Fourth bullet point in the article I posted above: "Scrum isn’t an acronym and isn’t spelt SCRUM"

[tazdevil]

What are you all wittering on about? I thought a scrum was something from rugby. With 40 years software development I've always JFDI and relied on my innate ability to guide me. Stop painting by numbers and be proper artists that's what I say

[Mordac]

There’s a company in Twickenham looking for a few SCRUM masters. Most of their workers are foreign but weren’t good enough to get work where they are from.

You're almost as funny as you think you are...

[anonymouse]

This seems to be rated read for Scrum

Essential ScrumPDF

[vetran]

We have a daily stand up, it does focus the mind (ABC -> Always Be Coding) , we do have to deliver or explain. If you combine it with a monthly sprint you do know where you are going.

It like many approaches does deliver some value, however like many religions one should just take part of the rules to get the true value.

[WTFH]

There’s a company in Twickenham looking for a few SCRUM masters. Most of their workers are foreign but weren’t good enough to get work where they are from.

[yetanotherbob]

Michael O Church wrote a candid and controversial article about Scrum a few years ago. I guess the value derived from scrum depends on motive behind its use and how its used (i.e. as a method of empowerment or of control)
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com...-are-terrible/

[NickFitz]

Useful article: Scrum doesn’t say… A rant about what Scrum isn’t.

Many, if not most, of the complaints about Scrum I hear are caused by people mindlessly copying practices from whatever dysfunctional organisation they first learned about agile in.

[m0n1k3r]

So a 30 year old guy who has done a crappy course from a polytechnic university in an unrelated field thinks he can provide coaching to C level executive board?!

Are these people for real?

They are, unfortunately. And 95% of them couldn't give a dang about servant leadership, collaboration, agile mindset or continuous improvement. They really want to be managers instead. The remaining 5% are the ones companies should be looking for.

[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®":