Wow.. SCRUM is **horrible**...
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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.)
One of the biggest, and most important, things about agile programming is that it puts product advances firmly in the hands of the developers, by letting them know what is needed, and letting them decide on the most effective ways to implement it. Whenever I've seen it not working, it's because that element is broken, either: -- By management people who are taking that responsibility away from the developers/keeping the developers in the dark about things. -- By people on the development team who are not up to handling that kind of responsibility. -- By people who treat the methodology as if it were a Dungeons & Dragons game, where arcane rules created/ interpreted by one person must be followed to the letter, or you'll lose points. Being pissed off about it doesn't help. It's a problem; developers are supposed to be problem solvers. Banging heads solves nothing. Identify some specifics of the problems, and *discuss them with the team* to find a solution.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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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?
Actually, with the overhaul of the past few weeks, I'm glad my company uses SCRUM method. Clients can be overdemanding and that's where SCRUM becomes effective to manage workflow
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I don't agree with you. When used right SCRUM can work well. One of the most frequent reasons why we loose money is because of customers asking for changes without following the correct procedures. The changes they're asking for looks like small changes but it doesn't reflect its correct weight. There are lots of things that doesn't get considered at the time. SCRUM is suppose to prevent your boss from just randomly telling you what changes to make. Either you are a people pleaser saying yes to everything your boss tells you or your boss is super controlling. Either way someone needs to change in order for SCRUM to work on that front.
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." << please vote!! >>
Lol... so when your boss comes to you and tells you to make a random change, you tell him no? I tell other people no, don't really do that to my boss since he is my boss.
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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?
Scrum is great for weekly release cycles in e-business Zend or Rails shops that feel the need to tweak the user experience in step with the customer's attention span. Scrum is obsessive compulsive disorder for the enterprise. Luckily, scrum wasn't in vogue when packet switching was invented at DARPA or the World Wide Web was invented by TBL at CERN or the mouse pointer, Ethernet, the laser printer, the GUI, software components and exception handling (among other things) were invented at Xerox PARC and lucky scrum wasn't around when Linus Torvalds started work on Linux or Bjarne Stroustrup on on C++ or Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie on UNIX and C or John McCarthy on LISP or Guido van Rossum on Python or Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on neural networks or Alan bleeding Turing on general computation or John von Neumann on the things wot do it because... ...NONE OF THESE THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE BY A SCRUM.
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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?
Hold your horses! I don't think that SCRUM is your problem, more the implementation and understanding. Everything you do needs to be part of a user story so that everyone can see what is happening. If others don't know what you are doing, how can you justify saying no to their requests? I like SCRUM and think it is a very useful methodology if used wisely. Everything needs to be storied, for the above and, so that scope creep can be avoided and progress monitored. No one, especially bosses, should be aloud to override the system. If your boss feels the need for immediate inserts then he should story unknowns with a good reason; this can be done and does work. As for the PM approving everything, that is plain wrong. The PM is a stakeholder, not The Stakeholder. He may want foo, but you guys know bar is a pre-requisite. The agile world is about being flexible and this adaptability needs buy in from all team members. As soon as one tries to work outside the sprint, the concept will not work. Your boss's overrides are outside the system and that is the problem, not SCRUM.
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
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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?
It sounds like they're doing it badly wrong. I'd strongly recommend you get an agile coach/disaster recovery expert (not someone who trumpets a SCRUM qualification as a badge of competence) in immediately. I can personally recommend Allan Kelly[^] or Kevlin Henney[^], but if Uncle Bob[^] is in the vicinity do grab him before he wanders off. A good trainer will open your eyes and you'll all have a facepalm moment or three.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Scrum is great for weekly release cycles in e-business Zend or Rails shops that feel the need to tweak the user experience in step with the customer's attention span. Scrum is obsessive compulsive disorder for the enterprise. Luckily, scrum wasn't in vogue when packet switching was invented at DARPA or the World Wide Web was invented by TBL at CERN or the mouse pointer, Ethernet, the laser printer, the GUI, software components and exception handling (among other things) were invented at Xerox PARC and lucky scrum wasn't around when Linus Torvalds started work on Linux or Bjarne Stroustrup on on C++ or Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie on UNIX and C or John McCarthy on LISP or Guido van Rossum on Python or Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on neural networks or Alan bleeding Turing on general computation or John von Neumann on the things wot do it because... ...NONE OF THESE THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE BY A SCRUM.
shiprat wrote:
the GUI, software components and exception handling (among other things) were invented at Xerox PARC
That's true, but in interviews I've read with Alan Kay, he endorses the approach. In fact Agile methodologies came from the Smalltalk community, which also invented GUIs, Refactoring, Test-Driven Development. As for C++, it's a bit of abomination really. No module architecture in 2013? No standard library for networking in 2013? Unfortunately, it remains the best way to write low-level code, but that shouldn't be counted as a sign of good design. Its lack of true support for dynamic dispatch is the reason we still have to regularly restart programs/systems when updating software.
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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?
The problem with being everyones' buddy as you apparently wish to be, is that it has the potentially of screwing up the team effort as a whole: 1. If your buddy asks you to do a quick fix, it may turn out that fix breaks another feature that you don't even know of, or simply doesn't fit with changes other team mates are currently working on. You may be forced to revert that change, and your buddy may be forced to do even more work finding a workaround to his original problem. 2. Where's the limit? 5 Minutes? Half an hour? Half a day? Do you even know in advance how much time you'll need? No matter where you set the limit, if enough of those requests hit you, alltogether they may eat up a significant part of your time. As a result the tasks you have been assigned to get delayed, and other team members waiting for you to finish may get delayed as well. 3. Do your buddies' requests even make sense? They may not meet project standards, or may conflict with design concepts that your system architecture has carefully laid out to meet the project requirements. In any case, if your project leader doesn't even know of the suggested change, then you risk breaking the project as a whole because of things that you don't even know about. Not saying this will always happen - probably nothing will come of it 90% of the time. But if everyone works like that, the number of cases that go wrong will quickly accumulate to a very nasty heap and leave your project in a mess. That said, over-managing a project is a problem as well. If someone needs a quick fix that isn't covered by the current assignments, the project leader may very well decide to skip the normal process and just do it. But it is the project leader who must make that decision, not you or your buddy. It is his task to decide whether such a quick change-of-plan is safe to implement immediately, bypassing the normal process, or not.
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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. 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.Isn't this exactly how our government is shaping up? Laws for everybody but those at the top and regulatory nightmare for the rest of us? Think about 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 wouldn't call it "worst methodology ever". But it can get very bad. Actually, I've never seen it working well. I know people who did it, but I've never really seen that. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Having frequent client validation, how to work in conditions of trust and not break this trust, separating a story into tasks, having a daily meeting. But people feel a false sense of security. "We have Scrum, so nothing can go wrong" (I've really heard this, I almost cried out of laughter). People take a methodology, pick from it some bits to create a method, and then think that that's all. It can replace project management studies and experience. You don't need anything! You just follow a receipt! And when the problem gets really complicated (as in where more than 4 people are involved :P) all breaks down: short-term thinking, constant rush to get the x ridiculous feature out, estimate inflation, scrum points calculated twice (as features and bugs) to show the team is getting faster, zero pride of ownership, not being able to say anything bad for someone's work, countless meetings with too many people... Actual scrum literature and blogs have many interesting advice to address the shortcomings (retrospectives to address long-term productivity issues etc etc). But if you actually pass your time to read all that, you are PROBABLY a scrum devotee. I've heard people congratulating each other because "you implement almost all of Scrum artifacts". That's when from an actual nuisance it becomes an organised religion, and it gets even worse. They have a hammer and everything's a nail. Good project managers know when to use iterative approaches and when not to. Good project managers know where you have a situation of trust and when you want to maximize control. Good project managers have studied multiple methodologies and they create a different method for each project. Scrum is just one of those methodologies, equally useful as ETHICS (a Scandinavian method) or Soft Systems Methodology (mostly researched in the UK) or pick your favourite. It's barely more useful than MERISE (a French method I never actually understood :P) and :~ waterfall :~ approaches.
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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?
What you are experiencing has nothing to do with scrum. Scrum is the antithesis of what you describe. You just work at a horrible workplace. No methodology can fix that.
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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?
And out of curiosity, who the heck is the PM? SCRUm has no PM.
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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?
To a smaller degree, this is my experience too. The problem is that there are too many chiefs and not enough indians. Once a chief has been appointed (by the other chiefs) they will, almost invariably, begin a reign of paperwork, process and bureaucracy. The whole point of this is to establish control, give the orders and thereby establish yourself as a chief with a big tent. I have an even worse problem with software release. It's diabolical how these 'enterprise' organisations work - I'm shocked that they ever get any software produced. Go back ten years a SCRUM seemed like an entirely reasonable solution to the problem of PM. People who sell it don't realise the harm they're doing because, to them, they're selling a solution (to a problem they remember). They need to take a step back and consider what goes wrong as soon as these solutions are rolled out to the 'enterprise'.
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It sounds like they're doing it badly wrong. I'd strongly recommend you get an agile coach/disaster recovery expert (not someone who trumpets a SCRUM qualification as a badge of competence) in immediately. I can personally recommend Allan Kelly[^] or Kevlin Henney[^], but if Uncle Bob[^] is in the vicinity do grab him before he wanders off. A good trainer will open your eyes and you'll all have a facepalm moment or three.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
It sounds like they're doing it badly wrong. They can only do it one way because the people selling SCRUM to the enterprise don't care how it is done. It's the responsibility of those making a living out of SCRUM to do it better. Whoever (a) wrote a book on SCRUM, (b) makes money providing SCRUM solutions, or (c) behaves or actually is a SCRUM-master. The people causing the problem are those who should be fixing it.
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And out of curiosity, who the heck is the PM? SCRUm has no PM.
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Not necessarily trying to be a gun slinger lol. I guess I was a bit frustrated before when we had no management and just did everything randomly. Problem is now we have gone formal, but the manager is still stuck in his random ways which is in conflict with SCRUM. I agree... he should have ZERO say on the product, but unfortunately, he thinks he does because the PM / Owner / Scrum Master who doesn't show up to scrum meetings doesn't really know whats going on.
I am currently working in a SCRUM environment and I think it works well. We have daily stand-ups that usually last less than 15 minutes and our management does not inject additional features until all work scheduled for the current sprint is complete. My biggest issue is that, since we no longer do any type of group status meeting, I don't really know what other people are working on. I agree with some of the other comments here. Getting direction from two sources is a no-win situation for you. I've been in this situation before and it never ends well for the person in the middle. I would suggest you get the two conflicting parties together (email, meeting, whatever) and ask them to provide one direction for your work. Do whatever you can to publicly CYA in case everything hits the fan. Good Luck, RTS
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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?
It's horsemeat, that's what it is. Scrum is two opposing teams pushing against each other. It must have been an american football fan that came up with the use. Certainly wasn't a rugby fan that's familiar with rugby. I think they meant to say 'huddle' with this. But like many new paradigms in programming, some marketing types loaded up a powerpoint presentation and destroyed the idea.
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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?
Whomever trained your staff did not explain the "No Managers/Supervisors" part clearly; that is what the squeaky toys are for, when someone is beginning to manage the show too much. It is supposed to be a team effort and not really any paperwork except the back log. Stories need to be broken down into tasks before you can really get any sense of it being acclomplished; not sure how a desicion from one person can make that. The only issue I have had is the wasting time in meetings when others have nothing to talk about but their personal issues/lives and where are we going to eat for lunch :wtf:
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Hold your horses! I don't think that SCRUM is your problem, more the implementation and understanding. Everything you do needs to be part of a user story so that everyone can see what is happening. If others don't know what you are doing, how can you justify saying no to their requests? I like SCRUM and think it is a very useful methodology if used wisely. Everything needs to be storied, for the above and, so that scope creep can be avoided and progress monitored. No one, especially bosses, should be aloud to override the system. If your boss feels the need for immediate inserts then he should story unknowns with a good reason; this can be done and does work. As for the PM approving everything, that is plain wrong. The PM is a stakeholder, not The Stakeholder. He may want foo, but you guys know bar is a pre-requisite. The agile world is about being flexible and this adaptability needs buy in from all team members. As soon as one tries to work outside the sprint, the concept will not work. Your boss's overrides are outside the system and that is the problem, not SCRUM.
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
Nagy Vilmos wrote:
As for the PM approving everything, that is plain wrong. The PM is a stakeholder, not The Stakeholder. He may want foo, but you guys know bar is a pre-requisite.
Is it? It's my understanding that I neither me nor my manager decides what needs to be implemented. The PM / PO does. I'm not saying the PM / PO sets priorities down to the implementation level, they set it at the user story / feature level. Lets say there are 10 features 1..10. I want to do 4, my boss wants to do 7... who cares? The PM / PO wants us to do 3 & 6 first. So thats what you should do. User stories are completely unrelated to each other. If you have a user story foo and user story bar is a pre-requisite, you are doing user stories wrong. bar should be a task in the user story, not a user story by itself. If bar is a big feature that foo relies on, then it becomes a user story and then you set the dependency. Ultimately, you are only supposed to work on "approved" work. And the PM / PO does that.
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PM=Project Manager. A formal methodology helps. Even if its is not optimally implemented.
I knew what PM meant. It just does not exist within SCRUM. Such a post is considered overhead, and is to be avoided. That is to say, if you are following the formal methodology of SCRUM, there is no Project Manager within scrum.