u/cybernd
cybernd
cybernd
Your picture, showing a house as healthy as typical software, reminded me of a story I once read:
- Building a house (why do a lot of developers dislike Agile?)
cybernd
Instead of scrum you could use kanban. Concentrate on the flow of stories through your system. Instead of a 2 week time-box you would have only a limit on the amount of tasks being worked on in parallel. Your focus should be on continuous improvement and reducing waste. Your task will be finished as soon as all quality criteria are met.
In my experience, ops teams have often the opportunity to escape scrum and have a tendency to favor kanban.
Dev teams will be forced to use scrum. Most probably because it has unique properties which are attractive to business people:
- It gives your management team the illusion of predictability. "If we know the amount of open story-points and our current velocity, we can predict the release date".
- There is also a misunderstanding caused by horrible naming. Sprint+Velocity gives the illusion of agile meaning faster deliveries.
- Sprint
commitment(cough) forecast gives your managers the illusion that your team promised to deliver everything within your sprint.
As side effect you are getting some of the following problems:
- Constant pressure
- Estimation: Couldn't you make this story a 3 instead of a 5? This does not look so complicated or?
- Estimation: The whole team estimates, but often a task gets assigned to the person knowing the least about a component. Now he is pressured to deliver faster than he can.
- Planning: It would be really nice if you could pull this additionally story. The other stories are probably overestimated, so this will work or?
- Planning: No, i don't allow you to work on this refactoring. We need the following story!
- Daily Standup: Many developers end up in a situation where they need to justify their job on a daily base and will start hiding what they are truly working on.
- Quality issues
- Missing Architecture. You can't future proof your architecture within a sprint. Business people are usually not allowing their team to refactor their codebase because this does not add value. I like his metaphor: quora comment
- Because of the short iterations it feels like: It's ok to skip the final refactoring or unit test. No problem it is just a small feature. We will fix that later. There is just the issue that it will never happen because the same bad decission will be made every sprint.
- Developers morale will drop
- We don't like regularly justifying our work. This goes against our intrinsic motivation.
- We don't like being forced to lie in estimation meetings. "No we can't accept that you don't know how long it will take" (Yeah in theory estimation would be based on complexity)
- Developers strive for excellency. Seeing your code base slowly become a mess will hurt a developers soul. Especially when other parties like a PO is causing it.
I also like his comment, as it explains one of the core traps of (fr)agile: quora comment
From my personal experience: Many ex-coworkers in my area moved to companies planning waterfall'ish. Why? Planning is still a mess, but finally they had some month to breath again.
cybernd
portraying managers as useless etc.. the reality is everyone is on the same team.
There is just one issue: Management is usually in power and as such they are not on the same team. Many of them abused their power. Developers simply started to push back for one very good reason: The usual misinterpretation of agile/scrum makes it impossible to implement their baby in a proper way. That sadly kills most motivation from once passionate developers.
When a developer gives "i don't know" as task estimation, how often do you think that the answer is accepted? In my opinion, it is already hostile when a honest, truthful answer coming from your expert is not accepted.
Edit: Just found some gems while searching for "do developers hate scrum?":
cybernd
Now I'm wondering if I was blind a few weeks ago. I live near a conrad shop and i'm pretty sure i checked there too.
I ordered 2 cells from ali because i could not find a legit offer:
My battery life time doubled, so i think that my received cells are legit and "relative" new.
If someone found this post, i recommend checking the austrian conrad store, because it may be possible that the german stores are soon not longer available for normal customers. They announced to focus on business customers. In austria it seems like the stores will continue their operation.
Dummerweise ist diese Randgruppe ziemlich groß.
Es wird nur zu gerne vergessen welches Destabilisierungspotential eine zu große Menge an perspektivenlosen Männern aufweist. Es wird gerne vergessen das die Chance auf eine Partnerin für viele Männer einen wichtigen Antriebsfaktor darstellt. Hier im Sub wird ja gerne darüber philosophiert das teure Wohnungen dazu geführt haben das sich junge Leute nicht reinhängen. Es wird jedoch nur zu gerne ignoriert das eine Chance auf eine aus der Sicht des Individuums wertvolle Partnerin durchaus ebenfalls zu den männlichen Antriebsfaktoren gehören.
Zusätzlich sollte man auch noch auf das Wort "unattraktiv" eingehen, denn es handelt sich dabei nicht automatisch um häßliche/mittellose Männer. Es ist eher so das diese unattraktiver wirken als die Konkurrenz. An der Stelle müsste man auch berücksichtigen das wir in den letzten 10 Jahren eine starke Veränderung der Datingkultur erlebt haben und deshalb ebenfalls diese Randgruppe größer geworden ist. Viele der Männer die zuvor kein Problem gehabt hätten sind nun zu diesen "unattraktiven" Männern geworden. Es handelt sich also genaugenommen um die selbe Qualität an Mann, jedoch haben sich die Rahmenbedingungen stark verändert. Es gibt noch weitere Faktoren die diese relative Attraktivität zu lasten dieser "Randgruppe" verändert haben.
Aber wie du schon sagtest, da diese Männer über keinerlei Lobby verfügen, werden diese Themen so gut wie nie thematisiert. Schlimmer noch, denn wenn es etwas expliziter thematisiert wird gibt es sehr viele Menschen die versuchen dieses Thema wieder untern den Tisch zu kehren.