Timeline for Does anyone else feel Scrum isn't agile?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
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| Apr 6, 2015 at 23:50 | history | edited | Robert Harvey | CC BY-SA 3.0 | deleted 12 characters in body |
| Jul 8, 2014 at 5:44 | comment | added | Stefan Billiet | @Giorgio yours is a somewhat dangerous discourse. It's true that in some cases, it makes perfect sense to deviate from mainstream Scrum. But way too many teams think that they've found a reason to deviate, when in reality they do not understand the point of some practice or other. As an aside, given how long a standup should only take, I fail to see what's the big deal. Frankly, if doing standups is indeed wasteful for a hypothetical super mature team, and that's their biggest waste, I envy them. | |
| Jul 4, 2014 at 5:30 | comment | added | Giorgio | @jessehouwing: Yes, but imposing meetings on a mature team is like going up to someone who can perfectly walk and telling them: look, you have a problem, you cannot walk, I will teach you to walk properly. These people will look at you and ask themselves: Hey, what does this guy want from me? Of course I can walk. So, imposing daily meetings on a mature, self-organizing team only disturbs their work flow: it is just waste. Such a decision can be either be explained by incompetent management or by the will to observe / control how the team works. | |
| Mar 11, 2014 at 7:10 | comment | added | Stefan Billiet | @ErikReppen as it is with just about anything, you have a small group of people who come up with a worthwile improvement and then you get a much bigger group that wants to monetize it and generally perverts it completely :-p I believe in Scrum, but I completely distance myself from the Scrum Alliance and its certification business. | |
| Mar 11, 2014 at 4:41 | comment | added | Erik Reppen | I don't hate everything about it but IMO, Scrum makes a lot more sense when you think of it as an industry. | |
| Jan 21, 2014 at 8:54 | comment | added | jessehouwing | @Giorgio, Some of the meetings might feel superfluous, even to an experienced developer, but even if the team is able to reduce the time needed to have these events, I've rarely seen a team that can do without them. I've often seen a team that thinks they can do without, until you reinforce the purpose of these meetings with them. Just with XP you can remove any of the practices, but you need to put something back in place to cover the original goals. Many of the rituals shouldn't feel like a fixed meeting format and each meeting should be an opportunity to learn and align the team as a whole. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:44 | comment | added | Stefan Billiet | @Giorgio yes, but the Agile manifesto talks from the perspective of an ideal, mature team. The reason you have to obey rigorously at first, is because most people don't approach new things with a beginners mind. They think "oh standups are just like status meetings" and "I already know how to do planning meetings" and before you know it, they've instituted their own bastardized version of Scrum. People who are new at something don't always understand why things are the way they are. That insight can only come from correct practice and experience. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:32 | comment | added | Giorgio | @Stefan Billet: I agree with you. Ritual meetings can be useful at the beginning of a project, for team formation. But as soon as the team starts to play well together, there rituals start to feel superfluous and getting rid of them should be the ultimate goal of agile: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" sounds the opposite of "applying the rules rigorously". At least, this seems the most obvious interpretation of the agile manifesto to me. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:24 | comment | added | Stefan Billiet | @Giorgio Naturally. I feel that, once the team and the stakeholders around the team have matured in their scrum implementation, they can start to deviate from the guidelines and experiment to grow further. But as in everything, you first have to obey the rules rigorously before you can begin to digress from them, and before you can outgrow them. The beginner's mind is crucial in this. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:18 | comment | added | Giorgio | @StefanBillet: And shouldn't developers be free to decide each time who attends the meeting and who doesn't? | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:13 | comment | added | Giorgio | @Michael Borgwardt: By micromanagement I mean keeping track of the details the team's activity beyond necessary. In a working team people talk to each other when needed, i.e. when there is some relevant information to communicate. I would find it more agile to let each team member decide when there is a need to communicate. That can be once in a week or 5 times a day, according to the situation. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 20:09 | comment | added | Stefan Billiet | @Giorgio very simple: only developers are allowed to talk during the standup. Others can attend, but must remain quiet. In more mature teams, this can be relaxed; I don't tell our PO to be quiet, because he only talks if we ask him something. But in environments such as you describe, I would be adamant. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 17:32 | comment | added | Michael Borgwardt | @Georgio: depends on what you mean by micromanagement. The goal of a daily standup in SCRUM is to keep everyone informed on what everyone else is doing, not to provide an opportunity for a project manager to chastise people for not meeting estimates. In fact, there is no project manager in SCRUM, tracking and adjusting estimates is the job of the team, and if they are not met the question to ask is "what caused it and how can we avoid or allow for it in the future?", not "whose fault is it and how bad can we make him feel?" | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 17:30 | comment | added | Julia Hayward | The standups are for the team to organise their time so that they are not getting in each other's way. It's absolutely inappropriate to talk about estimates, time elapsed on past tasks etc. - indeed a project manager (as opposed to the scrum master) should arguably not be attending at all. | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 16:51 | comment | added | Giorgio | In what way are daily standups different from micromanagement? | |
| Jan 20, 2014 at 15:35 | history | answered | Stefan Billiet | CC BY-SA 3.0 |