Wow.. SCRUM is **horrible**...
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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'.
-
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.
-
And out of curiosity, who the heck is the PM? SCRUm has no PM.
-
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
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
But "cool" features may add much to the value of the product, and may have never occurred to customer, who may not even understand the technical details, nor usability issues.
-
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 decribing is the succuessful end goal of any mgmt tool. prevent the customer from breaking through and getting cool stuff he actually wants. Heavens knows what would happen if the customers really got the simple little thing they wanted instead of the complex nightmare the suits thinks he really needs. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled off is convincing developers that sales and customers were the enemy and mgmt was protecting them.
-
But "cool" features may add much to the value of the product, and may have never occurred to customer, who may not even understand the technical details, nor usability issues.
That kind of cool feature is likely to be accepted by the client as being worth specing and adding to the backlog. But it shouldn't get implemented without asking them if they want it (well unless it's trivial but then the OP here would have no trouble sneaking it in under the radar anyway).
-
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 not the problem per se. The problem may be your boss and teammates wielding scrum as a weapon instead of as a tool. Or the problem may be your assumption that everything you think is cool ought to go into the project in a random order. When your boss asks you to make changes at random, just ask, "What's the ticket number for that issue?" If he doesn't have a ticket number, slow way down and say, "Tell me more about just what you want here. What's the user story? What do you mean by <this> or <that>?" If your boss actually wants you to do something, he can't very well refuse to answer these questions. After a few minutes, say, "Wow, that's a lot to remember. Could you please put all that information into a ticket so I can remember what you want?" If your boss balks in any way, you can say, "I thought we were doing scrum. Did we decide not to do scrum?" It's not like your boss can retaliate for you asking to do your job. And it's not like he's gonna say, "We usually do scrum except when I personally don't want to." And if he fires you for trying to do your job according to your company's own rules, he's doing you such a huge favor, because that job isn't worth going to every day. Then, recognize that this is exactly what your teammates are doing to you. And it's what they should be doing. The point is to keep people from going off half cocked, and to prioritize changes under limited resources. If you had unlimited team resources and no deadline, none of it would be necessary.
-
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.
lol, extending the discussion to the pros and cons of C++ should bring a quick resolution to any differences! C and C++ can do anything on anything, thats why they won't go away. "..he endorses the approach." Probably because he didn't start out his career as a scrum smurf. I may be wrong, but my impression is that scrum suppresses individual talent in favour of interchangeable parts that can be outsourced and repurposed to suit managerial goals.
-
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.
-
I don't get your point - not sure how it relates to what I said.
"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
mark merrens wrote:
I don't get your point - not sure how it relates to what I said.
The building building the system are waiters. The customers are the customer. The cook, the waiter and the general manager get to decide who does the work but the customer gets to decide what they want. And that can't happen if the cook/waiter/gm are making up stuff as they go along.
-
Where in my statements do I say there will be no sales people? Where do I even imply that? I know many people who have gone from coding to sales, and I'll never hire a salesman that never professionally coded. Believe me, there are plenty of developers that want to move to sales. I see the results of salesman who work for commissions without a clue as to what development entails. It's shitty deadlines and bad promises that "must be kept at all costs" even if the cost is greater than that one sale, the man hours of developers to build product or feature is higher than the revenue generated to company minus sales commission. I have seen this happen firsthand, and you know what the decision came down to? Saving face and keeping one more customer away from a competitor. Meanwhile, to the salesman, the commission won't be docked, so what do they care about developers' long nights? The salesman biting off more than the team should ever try to chew is the only winner, and continues to be rewarded for making a decision that's bad for the company.
wizardzz wrote:
Where in my statements do I say there will be no sales people? Where do I even imply that?
It is implicit in the statement "everybody will have the ability to code". At best finding a good sales person that meets the reqs will be difficult. Finding many that meet it will be impossible.
wizardzz wrote:
Believe me, there are plenty of developers that want to move to sales.
I suspect we have different definitions of "plenty". And the fact that someone wants to do sales has nothing to do with whether they are good at it or not.
wizardzz wrote:
It's sh***y deadlines and bad promises that "must be kept at all costs" even if the cost is greater than that one sale, the man hours of developers to build product or feature is higher than the revenue generated to company minus sales commission.
That however is a management problem. Both in failing to manage the sales people and in agreeing to contracts that do not make money. Yet again another very important position that someone that slings code, no matter how well, is unlikely to be proficient at.
wizardzz wrote:
so what do they care about developers' long nights?
It is often the case that no one cares about that because it does not cost any more money in the short term at most places.