[HN Gopher] The MANY Alternatives to Scrum
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The MANY Alternatives to Scrum
Author : rbanffy
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-10-01 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rethinkingsoftware.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rethinkingsoftware.substack.com)
| hyggetrold wrote:
| Would have loved to see the author include a section on Extreme
| Programming.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Still my favorite.
| bm3719 wrote:
| Probably the biggest disservice done by Scrum was changing our
| thinking and language around methodology. It made it so that if
| something was going to displace it, it had to start with a
| capital letter, be a "real" version of something, and have a lot
| of institutional momentum behind it. It acted like some kind of
| social exploit--one we had no immunity to.
|
| So, we ended up stuck with it, suffering untold millions of hours
| wasted in useless meetings and untold creativity crushed since it
| didn't fit into the process. We should've just tossed the notion
| that there's some kind of planning structure that makes sense
| across all possible projects, then done whatever made sense for
| our specific environments, not put a name on it, or even talked
| about "methodology" much at all.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Agile instead of agile, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, "shift left",
| etc are all words that indicate the place has not only drank
| the kool aid but tried to drown any voices of reason with it.
| inSenCite wrote:
| All these frameworks and still Common Sense reigns supreme yet
| rarely applied.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| Common sense is not common. Common sense is more akin to
| wisdom.
| __loam wrote:
| I like how kanban and agile are "alternatives" as if they're not
| very similar to how scrum it's defined.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| This is a weird and unbalanced selection... I expected to see
| waterfall or some variation on here, but nothing like it, even
| though it is very common. Lots of mentions of evolving & fully-
| autonomous engineering structures without even mentioning how
| this interfaces with all the other parts of every company larger
| than a few people. Valve's approach is not really a methodology
| vs. a perk from generating ridiculous per head revenues for a
| pretty small company. Shape up can only work as described when
| your company is small and run by a benevolent dictator will
| complete control.
| tuna74 wrote:
| The subtext of the article seems basically to be that the author
| does not want to estimate tasks. Which is nice when someone else
| pays. It is less nice when you have to pay however.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Despite what they have told you, that's never a real issue. If
| the project is divided into small tasks, if progress is not
| being made on these tasks, the management always has the right
| to steer the direction of the project or to reassign the staff
| tasked to it. This is how management can continue to control
| the expenses. As for estimates, even an AI can give those,
| probably better than what a human can, and without any stress.
| tuna74 wrote:
| So if you would hire someone to redo your bathroom or
| kitchen, you would hire them without an estimate and quote as
| long as they divide the project into small tasks?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison at all. A bathroom or kitchen
| is something they have worked on a hundred or more times
| before, with little variation. In contrast, software is
| almost always original. If you ask me to implement the same
| software a hundred times with minor variations, of course I
| can give you good estimates without stress.
| bdangubic wrote:
| THIS exactly is what Software "professionals" have
| amazingly successfully been able to convince everyone.
| That somehow what we do is "special" and we just cannot
| possible tell you how long XYZ is going to take...
| Software "is almost always original" is the same argument
| as if an incompetent carpetner would say "sorry, no two
| kitchens are alike and while I use same sh*t to build
| them I have never built yours exactly and hence I'll send
| you the bill when I am done."
| Smar wrote:
| How often carpenter needs to study while constructing what
| is the correct method to build to wall, and while doing
| that, try to find out whether the client wanted the wall or
| a floor, or even both of them?
|
| Try to give any proper estimations before actually starting
| that kind of project, when the scope is not known and there
| is no buy-in to spend half of the time just to plan all
| little details.
|
| It is not just "give an estimation", but a whole procedure
| to complete.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > So if you would hire someone to redo your bathroom or
| kitchen, you would hire them without an estimate and quote
| as long as they divide the project into small tasks?
|
| I love these general contractor analogies because it tells
| me that these people don't understand software engineering.
|
| Here's an answer for you: the vast majority of software
| engineering is less like repetitive contracting and more
| like unpredictable lab experimentation.
|
| It is up to management and business to decide if they are
| skilled and willing to accept the nature of software
| engineering.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yeah, the real world needs costs, estimates, timelines.
|
| And you can help make them as good as possible.
| ElectricSpoon wrote:
| This reads like someone which had bad management using effort
| estimates as hours and bugged the team about it. I'm saying that
| having seen plenty of environments where they do Scrum wrong.
|
| > Because there are no sprints, you don't have to worry about
| whether something fits into a sprint
|
| I like fitting things into sprints. It forces tasks to be broken
| down into manageable items. If it's too big to fit, it's also
| probably ill-defined. Sometimes it goes over the sprint; it's
| alright; discuss during retro and learn from it.
|
| > If an emergency arises, everyone pauses their work
|
| You can still do that with Scrum. Scrum is a framework to
| estimate the effort and measure at fixed points in time. That's
| not an excuse to dismiss issues. Unless all of your work is
| unplanned, you can handle surprises AND estimate your leftover
| velocity.
| davidjfelix wrote:
| I thought they debunked the "Spotify model" as something being
| promoted by a few consultants but also being phased out at the
| same time as being exposed to the public (nearly 10 years ago in
| 2014).
|
| There are dozens of articles about the problems with matrix
| management that it introduced.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "When you finish a task, you simply pull the next one from the
| top of the backlog"
|
| Please, no. When you've finished a task see if you can help with
| a blocked or in-flight task.
|
| Teams win points for finishing work, not starting new work.
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