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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:32PM
LARP = Live Action Role Playing
It really makes a difference to team productivity if they're in costume or not?
Knock me over with a feather...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:40PM
Well I'm thinking more of how everyone in the SCA (that I've seen) magically grows the accent and interests of an English nobleman, and it just as quickly disappears after they cross the border of the renn fair.
Regardless its live action role playing in the SCA / Faire / DnD sense, just they do it in meetings with paperwork and the instant the meeting ends or the SCRUM mistress turns her back or whatever, its back to their "real management style" which for failures is inevitably management by screaming, or management by death march, or management by hoping unsupervised people guiltily do the right thing, or whatever other pathologies failing companies actually implement outside their LARP parties.
Seriously though, nobody else has noticed like I have that the primary predictor of success is behavior actually matching signaled belief, and the name of the specific development fad not mattering at all?
I've seen a similar although much weaker correlation with employee reviews, where in that case success seems to correlate with lack of BS rather than which specific fad has the lack of BS? I think its weaker because frankly most people ignore most employee review processes other than a crunch week around review time.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @03:29PM
Haha wow, I was being flippant and you really did mean Live Action Role Playing.
Well, I agree with what you're saying. Most business is about "meme of the month." Most human activity that I've been involved in, actually, from government to non-profit to grassroots. Even academia. Scientists might say they're data driven, but they too need to play meme of the month to get grant money.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:00PM
I am glad I am not the only one that thought I had misunderstood a new entry in Buzzword Weekly.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:16PM
I can't agree with this more. I worked for a big company that has been waterfall (at best, but more like Big Ball of Mud [laputan.org]) for years. New owners come in, shake up management, declare we are all going to do SCUM now! (is it SCRUM or scrum? what does SCRUM stand for?)
About half the employees get some training on it (my team wasn't on the list), and the best I can see is that some of those teams try to do a daily meeting instead of a weekly one. Ended up with a dozen people standing at the end of my row talking while I had my headphones on trying to ignore them. (quips of "get a room" were met with hostility)
My boss had like 20+ direct reports, so he had no idea what any of his employees were doing. And anytime we tried to sit down and talk as a team it took 2 hours, so we didn't even meet monthly. It would take so long we would never get our jobs done. I made sure to never speak up in meetings, lest I cause hundreds of dollars of damage to the company by wasting 10 minutes of 20 people. Result, nothing changed except terminology. Senior management did not care as long as we pretended we were scrum and got our jobs done.
The dozen people in that daily scrum meeting quit doing it after a while when half of them were remote employees and its really hard to have a quick 15 minute meeting when so many of them were on the phone.
My current job does a thing we call scrum, in so much that we usually meet 4 times a week and talk about stuff for 10-30 minutes. Even though we use git and bitbucket, scrum is useful for doing group code reviews on big pushes, or designing new components. Our team has 4 members (3 dev + 1 qa), and I would say 6 is the absolute most for a scrum, maybe less if they are all developers. "Scrum master" is simply the supervisor/dev lead, I know its not necessarily supposed to be a boss, but I can't see how it can work any other way.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:44PM
Forsooth! Borgorroth of Coolswordorroth shimmies for no feature request! But do not tread into the COBOL directory, in it sleeps an ancient dragon that will smite all that awaken it!
Roll for initiative.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:54PM
And then the managers walk out the SCRUM meeting room door and its back to "management by shouting" or "management by firefighting" or whatever and all the SCRUM and/or fake english accents are gone.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @03:39PM
As a manager, I've always really wanted to try "management by cattle prod."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:03PM
"And if you finish this goal on time, you get to zap me"
Oh wait I bet thats not what you were thinking LOL.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:52PM
How did you know the games we play out West?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:46PM
From the point of view of management, heck yes it does.
Odds are not zero that you wear a costume to the office as well: As in, it's not uncommon for people to wear a button down and slacks at the office, but not when they're just walking about town on a Saturday. You might also have to add in a tie and/or suit coat. Even if you don't wear a costume like this to the office on a regular basis, you almost definitely wore one when you interviewed for the job or sat down to meet with a client to get a contract. All of this has at best zero effect on productivity of course, but some idiots in management still like people to have to play dress-up (they call it "looking professional") as part of earning a paycheck. Women have it even worse than men, because the costume isn't standardized so you get stupid stuff like the New York Times reporting on what color Hillary Clinton was wearing during the Benghazi committee meeting as if that was somehow important.
And not totally unrelatedly, my experience with LARPing has actually helped me professionally, because it's prepared me for dealing with groups of people that would just as soon stab me in the back as work with me.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.