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Ah, it has finally happened: the first publication that has declared that Scrum is dead. Apparently, the over-paid consultants have relieved the under-clued bosses of all the money they can, so it's time for the next fad.
Scrum works, of course. Just about any software development methodology works, as long as you have good people working in a disciplined team. If you have a lousy team, adopting the latest fad isn't going to help you.
Iterative development is an old technique. I knew of it as far back as the 1980's, but writing this submission, I see that it has roots much farther back. In software, all the way back to the 1950s. In product development generally, it goes back at least to the 1930's, when Walter Shewhard proposed short "plan, do, study, act" cycles for product improvement.
So: let's take bets. What will the next fad be? TFA says it will be the "open development method". What do Soylentils think the consultants will be selling our bosses in five years?
(Score: 4, Informative) by SanityCheck on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:00PM
Hard to wager here, because I still cannot comprehend a lot of the stupid fads from the past. I do have a hate-hate relationship with scrum, but I think it can work for some things given proper set of circumstances.
For my Senior Project we all had to use some sort of Scrum... of course like all College projects it doesn't matter what you actually did, only what you present (ironically this is so true of the real world that it was perfect preparation for us). So I made up something that looked like scrum, and we all just did what ever the hell we felt like. The key to the project was picking a team, which I did very diligently. Everything else didn't matter.
The art of picking the team is probably what is most important. You have to pick people not only based on talent, but other factors. A very competent developer might be having some external issue which will mean he cannot focus at work and carry a full load (this was especially true at school where I could tell who was taking 17 credits vs 12, and I knew who had "relationship" issues). So sometimes going with less competent person, but one fully committed to the project is actually better choice (though a lot of managers put too much emphasis on commitment vs ability).
Unfortunately in the real world you rarely have a luxury of picking the right people. Your resources are usually assigned to you (often too few). So you have to learn to use them, or to keep them busy so they don't mess up the actual work.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:17PM
So sometimes going with less competent person, but one fully committed to the project is actually better choice
It is a question of ownership. I have been on successful scrum teams and crash out and burn ones.
The one thing common to all the ones that did not work. No one wanted the job. No one wanted to be there. No one wanted to OWN the work. So much like VLM pointed out above we ended up with LARP (I was one of them).
When we first started doing it at the place I currently work it was no big deal. It was pretty close to the way we did things anyway but just slightly more formal. No biggie. But then we re-arranged the teams. Everyone wanted to tweak it and throw out things that were rather important to the process (because it took too much time). Because people in the scrumm world are interchangeable (which is crap). So we ended up jumping around from project to project with no clear vision of what to do. In the end we are doing ok but the team is fairly demoralized and just a big list of things to do that have no order.
We ended up with 1-2 hour 'daily scrum' meetings with 50 people in the meeting. We picked the worst of scrum and the worst of waterfall and mashed them together. That went as well as you think.
Process is good. But you *have* to actually want it, own it, and most important execute on it.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:30PM
I have seen ones where someone wanted to own the job and was the scrum leader... but had no authority to get anything done. They could not tell the other members of the team what to do, and they had no authority in the company, so they could not make others (usually IT or Facilities) do things like get servers set up or desks arranged. And their meetings get pre-empted by other bosses, and their human resources stolen by "more important" projects.
I think the problem is they were not actually doing scrum, they were a waterfall LARPing (going to use VLM's term from now on) as scrum. And, even worse, they were the classic hierarchy management company where middle managers at the same level were force to fight it out cage-match style to get resources allocated to them by the god-like senior management.
(If you read my posts, you can tell how much I despise large companies.)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:55PM
Are you one of my former coworkers? I left a place because of that kind of project management style!
I left another place because that kind of project management style was actually an improvement over the previous regime's project management style, which was "Ticket tracking? Bah! Change management? Forget it! Testing servers? Just do everything in production! Unit testing? Nah! QA staff? Waste of money!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:21PM
eehhh no dont think so. Apparently it can get worse! :) At least we have QA, staged production, and ticket tracking.