Wow.. SCRUM is **horrible**...
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I personally think that SCRUM is fine, but it's very easy to misuse it beyond sane limits. If it's not managed and run properly, it can be horrible. Idiot managers can make it a nightmare (which happened in my previous company).
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
If it's not managed and run properly,
Usually managed to death, and I will not be joing another meeting where people will discuss what "properly run" entails. ..and no, it ain't a silver bullet by which all problems dissapear.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Seems like your project is being run by a control freak who'd be a stickler for writing up tickets whatever methodology he was using. Scrum is a good way of making sure that what gets into the backlog is what the product owner wants, and that what is in the backlog gets done in an orderly and predictable fashion. It definitely shouldn't be suppressing teamwork, and in fact being an agile methodology it's closely related to Extreme Programming which pushes teamwork very hard. However, 'making the product cool' is not necessarily a good use of developer time if the 'coolness' isn't something that the customer cares about. If you're used to just being able to write cool stuff and never mind the priority that the end user would put on what you're working on, then you're going to feel constrained by any kind of project management.
BobJanova wrote:
Seems like your project is being run by a control freak who'd be a stickler for writing up tickets whatever methodology he was using.
Neatly summed up.
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
SledgeHammer01 wrote:
Thoughts?
I'm looking forward to Saturday. Now that Lawes is going to be playing as a blindside flanker, it should make for a fascinating match with the French.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier -
Feeling a bit scrummy are we?
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
I agree: when scrum is applied religiously it can disrupt the development process and alienate the participants and don't get me started on the waste of time that are daily scrums! I've used a modified system in the past, picking out the bits that best serve the team and the process, in that order. Scrum puts the process first and people second which, to me, is the wrong way round if you expect to get buy-in from the people you are expecting to build your system.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
If team members feel that way, they're not doing it right.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Seems like your project is being run by a control freak who'd be a stickler for writing up tickets whatever methodology he was using. Scrum is a good way of making sure that what gets into the backlog is what the product owner wants, and that what is in the backlog gets done in an orderly and predictable fashion. It definitely shouldn't be suppressing teamwork, and in fact being an agile methodology it's closely related to Extreme Programming which pushes teamwork very hard. However, 'making the product cool' is not necessarily a good use of developer time if the 'coolness' isn't something that the customer cares about. If you're used to just being able to write cool stuff and never mind the priority that the end user would put on what you're working on, then you're going to feel constrained by any kind of project management.
That's actually quite the opposite. I used to get along great with my boss because we both enjoyed the "cool / unofficial" environment where you just want to get stuff done and move forward and scratch each others back environment. I think his boss wanted us to do SCRUM on this project, but my boss doesn't really want to conform to it. He never shows up to stand ups (hell, nobody does), SCRUM rules don't apply to him, etc. He never cared about documenting ANYTHING... granted that was an issue too though lol, because half the stuff he would tell me to do, i would be like "wtf? never heard of that before" and he expected you to be a mind reader. Thats the issue though. We are trying to do SCRUM, but as I said, SCRUM rules don't apply to my boss, so he does the "hey, why don't you re-write this to work like this?" and I say "well, this is what the PM wanted" and he says "I don't care what the PM wanted, this is what I want".
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
If it's not managed and run properly,
Usually managed to death, and I will not be joing another meeting where people will discuss what "properly run" entails. ..and no, it ain't a silver bullet by which all problems dissapear.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
You sound like being in a project run by another horrendous "scrum master". We're only required to speak up if we're not on track, and perhaps if we need help. I don't remember attending one stand-up meeting in more than a month now, and I'm part of the scrum team too. I'm not claiming it to be a universal solution to solve everything, but it isn't as bad as the OP portrays it to be. Any tool can yield bad results if handled by someone who isn't skilled enough to operate it correctly.
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
Project management ideologies were created to, and continue to exist to, give PM's and other noncoder assholes jobs. This industry is diluted and hurt by people wanting to be part of it, simply because it pays well, and there is still some growth. These people don't want to, or simply can't code, so they take any other approach to gain entry. If, nay, when I start my company, everybody will have the ability to code, if you are in a non coding position, that one of your previous jobs will have been coding or you are currently learning. Everyone should understand the love affair with coding, the frustration, the rewards. Everyone. Lawyers, sales, human resources. Everyone.
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If team members feel that way, they're not doing it right.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I was going to say that, but sarcastically since that's the go to excuse about any dogmatic methodology. In all their glory SCRUM and Agile suck and make no damn sense. My overwhelming experience is that SCRUM and Agile do deliver software faster initially, but with much less quality and, largely due to this, increasingly longer delivery cycles and increasingly messy code. I've also found these methodologies are used by managers as an excuse to look like they're doing something and by a subset of bullying engineers (who all too often don't follow their own claims--it has gotten to the point where I'm close to positing that there is an inverse relationship between how much someone champions Agile/Scrum/extreme/etc methodologies and the quality of their code.)
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
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Project management ideologies were created to, and continue to exist to, give PM's and other noncoder assholes jobs. This industry is diluted and hurt by people wanting to be part of it, simply because it pays well, and there is still some growth. These people don't want to, or simply can't code, so they take any other approach to gain entry. If, nay, when I start my company, everybody will have the ability to code, if you are in a non coding position, that one of your previous jobs will have been coding or you are currently learning. Everyone should understand the love affair with coding, the frustration, the rewards. Everyone. Lawyers, sales, human resources. Everyone.
Wow, you and I think exactly alike. I also believe fervently that all involved, from a certain point down of course, need to have at least a fundamental understanding of coding. PM's are a waste of good oxygen. I still haven't met one worth spit. And all the PM's I know have zero coding experience. That means they 'issue orders' that usually are bizarre and create timelines that always fail because they don't know what they're asking for in terms of work. The best teams I'v been a part of are those where everyone, including decision makers, all know how to code.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Sounds like somethings going badly wrong. Agile methodologies, including SCRUM are supposed to empower the developers within an organisation. By the sound of it that isn't working, and the team may need a mentor to help sort out the ego's involved.
Rob Grainger wrote:
supposed to empower the developers
As soon as you use the term "empower" you know it's headed down the wrong trail. I feel so empowered having said that
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
"you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" - that only works in teams made of responsible and self-made people. But this is very uncommon nowadays. Instead, there are tons of half-educated fake players in IT. A typical dialog: - Sam: Why it doesn't work? - John: This is Tom's fault, he made a bug. He always injects bugs. - Tom: No, it does not work due to John's bug, this is his sole fault. SCRUM is here to fix that submarginal situation by putting a bit more responsibility in interactions between team members. So, if you hear some company uses SCRUM then you have to already know that the company experience troubles with team members.
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Project management ideologies were created to, and continue to exist to, give PM's and other noncoder assholes jobs. This industry is diluted and hurt by people wanting to be part of it, simply because it pays well, and there is still some growth. These people don't want to, or simply can't code, so they take any other approach to gain entry. If, nay, when I start my company, everybody will have the ability to code, if you are in a non coding position, that one of your previous jobs will have been coding or you are currently learning. Everyone should understand the love affair with coding, the frustration, the rewards. Everyone. Lawyers, sales, human resources. Everyone.
+5. Good luck.
CPallini wrote:
You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him. :Smile:
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"you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" - that only works in teams made of responsible and self-made people. But this is very uncommon nowadays. Instead, there are tons of half-educated fake players in IT. A typical dialog: - Sam: Why it doesn't work? - John: This is Tom's fault, he made a bug. He always injects bugs. - Tom: No, it does not work due to John's bug, this is his sole fault. SCRUM is here to fix that submarginal situation by putting a bit more responsibility in interactions between team members. So, if you hear some company uses SCRUM then you have to already know that the company experience troubles with team members.
Adding more process to make it look like you are doing something to fix the problem instead of just fixing the problem. That always ends well.
CPallini wrote:
You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him. :Smile:
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That's actually quite the opposite. I used to get along great with my boss because we both enjoyed the "cool / unofficial" environment where you just want to get stuff done and move forward and scratch each others back environment. I think his boss wanted us to do SCRUM on this project, but my boss doesn't really want to conform to it. He never shows up to stand ups (hell, nobody does), SCRUM rules don't apply to him, etc. He never cared about documenting ANYTHING... granted that was an issue too though lol, because half the stuff he would tell me to do, i would be like "wtf? never heard of that before" and he expected you to be a mind reader. Thats the issue though. We are trying to do SCRUM, but as I said, SCRUM rules don't apply to my boss, so he does the "hey, why don't you re-write this to work like this?" and I say "well, this is what the PM wanted" and he says "I don't care what the PM wanted, this is what I want".
This is a conflicting situation. There are two solutions: 1. Make a PM to be your new boss 2. Make your existing boss to be a PM You can not have two bosses involved in conflict of interest. This is a road to hell and you will be the one who failed at the end :sigh:
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Project management ideologies were created to, and continue to exist to, give PM's and other noncoder assholes jobs. This industry is diluted and hurt by people wanting to be part of it, simply because it pays well, and there is still some growth. These people don't want to, or simply can't code, so they take any other approach to gain entry. If, nay, when I start my company, everybody will have the ability to code, if you are in a non coding position, that one of your previous jobs will have been coding or you are currently learning. Everyone should understand the love affair with coding, the frustration, the rewards. Everyone. Lawyers, sales, human resources. Everyone.
:thumbsup: You confirmed to be ready to start your own company. The time has come, now or never. Have a good luck
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Adding more process to make it look like you are doing something to fix the problem instead of just fixing the problem. That always ends well.
CPallini wrote:
You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him. :Smile:
[irony mode="off"] It may end pretty well if PM is not a fake player. [irony mode="on"] Otherwise it indeed always ends well.
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I've worked for a lot of different companies, but this company is the first one where they have been "official" / "gone overboard" on SCRUM. Why does anybody use this garbage methodology? It is HORRIBLE. Personally, I prefer a cool environment where everybody on the team works together, wants to make the product cool, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, etc. SCRUM just breeds a "me" mentality. Sorry Bob, I don't care about your issue until you open a defect and get it approved by a PM and get it inserted into a sprint. Yeah Jim, that feature sounds cool!! Write up a user story and submit it to the PM for approval and get it inserted into the current or future sprint. SCRUM is just anti-team work, anti-pride of ownership, anti-innovation. I used to want to make my product cool and get along with my fellow team members, but now with SCRUM, I have to be a dick and say "write it up and get the PM to approve it". Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss. He can come and randomly tell me to make changes when he is neither the PM or the PO. I'm also discouraged from doing anything above and beyond because everything requires a ton of paper work and 73 people to get involved. Use to be.. hey John, can you bust that out real quick? You mean change this bool to false? Sure, no problem!! Be done in a sec. Now its "submit all the proper paperwork and get the PM to approve it". Worst methodology ever. Thoughts?
SledgeHammer01 wrote:
Apperently though, SCRUM doesn't apply to my boss.
"Selective agile development" isn't "agile development". I work at an agile shop and our daily scrums are anything but stressful. I (and my manager) always know what my workload is, and he's able to juggle/postpone fixes and features based on the team's capacity. I find the user story paradigm helpful because it forces stakeholders to clearly specify what they need built/done. If more work is required, a new task is created, and time estimates automatically increase (or decrease) as required. It seems your shop (despite their best intentions) may not be using the agile development process the way it's intended to be used. :( /ravi
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