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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 18 2015, @01:52PM
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
Not necessarily disagreeing with that vaguely true fact, but where I've seen scrum and other fads die the worst since 1981 or so in the field is places that LARP crash and burn and places that don't LARP can oddly enough do any damn thing and it none the less works. Weird but true.
What I mean by LARP is dress up and pretend to SCRUM, put on a fake SCRUM accent at the meeting table, act out some classic historical SCRUM drama although everyone knows they're just acting, etc. They crash and burn no matter what.
Yet weirdly enough places that actually do what they say can do anything and it'll none the less work. So SCRUM or waterfall or WTF away it don't matter they'll succeed solely thru the act of not LARPing.
I know this will sound weird but its a non-falsifiable observation.
As for disprovable nutty opinions my gut level guess of why this happens is enough individuals hate LARPing and are bad enough at LARPing that stuff falls apart and the dishonesty makes people hyper unmotivated. And its the unmotivated people who kill the project no matter what fad they are LARPing to. Now the opinions in this paragraph might be nutty.
As a side issue I liked the word poser in the 80s/90s but using poser made you a poser but LARP meaning about the same thing in the 2010s doesn't have the usage stigma, well at least not yet LOL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @01:56PM
Thanks society for making that post confusing
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:02PM
ArchLinux users sure are wild and crazy guys! [dailymail.co.uk]
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:29PM
Well, there are no goats in that part of town, and the Muslims have to rape something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:24PM
Come on, Ethanol. This comment is sub-par even by your standards.
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by OwMyBrain on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:20PM
For the most part I would agree with this. No matter how you dress it up...scrum, agile, waterfall, xp, the projects that are successful end up that way because the coders that do the work know the one true development methodology. [http]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:39PM
http://programming-motherfucker.com/ [programming-motherfucker.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:04PM
To pitch their *all new* method, complete with fluffy 150-pg books from Addison Wesley @$34.95 filled with "actual case studies", and trainers willing and eager to fly across the country spending a week "training the entire engineering team".
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:23PM
It could be worse. They could be trying to brainwash you into becoming an ArchLinux user. [orlandosentinel.com]
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:22PM
Meh, they could always be the homebrew distro type. http://i.imgur.com/wWshRSc.jpg [imgur.com]
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:25PM
Off to India! Oh, that's a fad - that shit is here to stay.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:26PM
Mom apologizes for her ArchLinux-using son's antics as the leader of his local LUG. [examiner.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:50PM
It'll work. They don't know that scrum is part of Agile. If they do know, they'll treat themselves to a training seminar that explains they were doing Agile all wrong anyway.
Reboot is in! It works for PCs and the movies. So, call this next fad "Rebooted Agile". Faster because it has new boots! (Do I hear anyone saying that's not what "reboot" means? Shh!) When that fad fades, it'll be time for Rebooted Waterfall!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @06:46AM
agile not so bad... compared to waterfall
but then comparing anything to waterfall is a very low bar
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:53PM
Scrum is dead! Long live...um...
Introducing Um! It's only 40% of Scrum, meaning it's a leaner, meaner, hipper way to develop your software.
The Um Manifesto
We are, um, covering better ways of developing software. Just do it!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:17PM
The UM methodology works like this:
- Understatement: All project requirements and estimates of resource usage (including but not limited to personnel and timeline) are understated to get the project approved by higher-ups.
- Misery: The project manager demands that all personnel assigned to the project work ridiculous hours of overtime for as long as it takes to get the project done.
This methodology is in common use in corporate environments where the people that make the decisions about which projects are to be prioritized have limited if any contact with the people who are supposed to do the actual work of making the project come to fruition. That's because project managers know that their performance rating depends on getting their projects approved (otherwise, their bosses can say "Well what have you accomplished this year?") more than getting their projects completed on schedule or within budget.
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, @07:29PM
Hey, you plagiarized that from my upcoming book "The Um Methodology Synergy Paradigm Shift Revolution: Why You Should Hire Me As A Consultant".
(Score: 3, Funny) by Subsentient on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:38PM
Scrum = Scrotum + Cum.
Um = Scrum - Scrotum
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by kazzie on Thursday November 19 2015, @06:05AM
Is this a pitch for more women in the workplace?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @03:44PM
I am personally devastated that Scrum is dead. It means that all my rugby metaphors will now be useless. I mean, it's not like any Americans on the team ever got the references, except for the womyn with that certain kind of build, but it was usually not that big a problem because the team was mostly H1B's from India anyway. For those it was never entirely cricket to employ so many rugby metaphors, but they got it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:20PM
Scrum was never a live. Sub in: Do what you want. Do produce produce.
In 30yr I have not seen a true waterfall or scrum. Scrums replaced weekly stays reports. Waterfall cut down number of releases per year.
The best was 3 guys: owner, his frienf and me. We would go to lunch and talk about family and what we want the system to handle 2 to 3 yrs. yes we had our own issues. Our lawyer neighbors offer free mediation services. Coming in after a long weekend finding code implemented that last week was agreed to do next cycle. But it was great fun. Writing freestanding multiway tree with compression. I tertask (pipes/queues/client-server). Still got a letter from IBM, asking for us not to do that, it hurts
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:14PM
I don't follow this stuff. I tend to just recommend an open discussion on features and implementations, with lots of communication between team members. Then again, I'm a lone developer. I don't need to have a master plan for working with others. In fact, none of my projects ever had the 'guts' planned out. I figured out what I wanted it to do, what libraries I wanted to use, and started writing it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:39PM
Among the reasons I've been unemployed for five years is that I don't mention Agile or Scrum anywhere on my resume. This leads recruiters to regard me as unqualified for their positions.
This despite that I first began developing my own methodology in 1988, and have quite a lot of experience with eXtreme Programming, from which Agile is derived.
"Surely you could mention Scrum on your resume?" you quite reasonably ask. And in fact I have quite a lot of experience with Scrum.
But were I to do that, the recruiters would receive their commissions.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:11PM
To date in my career I have never seen any correlation between project success and the methodology used for development.
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.
Bad management can destroy an otherwise good and functional team and dismantle a project while good management can rarely have a significant positive impact. A very effective tool for even well meaning and otherwise good management is Scrum.
Why? Because good management tends to his/her team in much the same way a gardener tends a garden. Spot the weeds and pull them before they take over the garden and destroy it.
Scrum teaches management that they can fix weeds and turn them into productive plants. Scrum encourages micromanagement. Scrum encourages a work flow that is normally misaligned with work size and scope. Scrum encourages bad developers to game the system so as to appear productive to management while doing nothing.
Scrum is in effect the ideal project management style to overstate the problem space while under delivering while discouraging good management by making them indistinguishable from bad management.
After having been through three successive Scrum disasters I now just turn away projects and organizations that say the use Scrum and Agile methodologies. I also turn down any place that insists I sit in an open office environment.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:20PM
Then you did it wrong three times!
I've directly experienced Scrum applied successfully twice now. The first time I was a newbie and joined a large company in a small but advanced team of exerts who had chosen to adopt and to implement Scrum themselves. The company adopted it, and invested in training. I was working with accomplished, intelligent, industrious people with 20 years more experience than me, It was cross-platform embedded real-time C and C++. Over the next four years we had formal training and we went from doing well to totally ruling.
Unfortunately, management decided that Engineering should be transferred to India.
I got a new, better paying job in a good team of people more my own age who were keen to learn and to do well. I introduced Scrum at the new place, and we went from never delivering any properly-working software to fortnightly tested deliveries of actual working features that we could show to the senior managers, and we kept it up for two years.
This got me a £5k pay rise and "Technical Leader" on my CV.
So, hopefully my anecdote cancels out your anecdote.
The ruthless cost-cutting PHBs came in and ruined that place. I now find myself doing "Fragile/Waterfail" in a very big company...
Scrum works, but you've got to know how to do it, and you've got to commit. As the little green man said," Do or do not. There is no try."
One final thing, though, teams take many months to gel, to work well together. Modern business is such that projects and who's working on what change on a daily basis and PHBs only want things cheaper i.e. corners cut. It doesn't matter what system you use, you are never going to achieve anything of significance in that environment whatever methodology you adopt.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Funny) by WittyUserName on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:19PM
...I thought we were still on Jackson's and SSADM.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:26PM
Oh god. I bet you think MISRA [wikipedia.org] Is the future.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].