Scrum feels like a miniature waterfall. In the worst cases, a sprint is a race to make something that won’t be embarrassing at review and demo on Friday, and then you finish it over the weekend because it’s getting released Monday (with an incident in prod on Tuesday because you had to half-ass some things). Afterwards, the SM is nagging you to enter your actuals in JIRA “so we can track velocity”.
Kanban is better in my experience since it at least does away with arbitrary deadlines, while still encouraging practices like backlog grooming and breaking down work into small units that can be completed in a week or less and then shipped. If you do a group pointing session and the consensus is that it’s going to take more than a few days, you go back and break it down further. If you run into issues with a work item and it takes a little longer than expected, no biggie, because quality is speed, unlike with Scrum where back-to-back sprints would force you to be working in the next thing because you’re now in a new sprint and last sprint’s work should’ve already been done. Didn’t you already show that in review and demo, so why are you still working on it?
You can actually see sprints as mini-Waterfalls. But the point is to fail and learn from it. I am sorry you had no Scrum Master with responsibility.
Not finished on Friday? So be it! Find out why and try a solution. You had distractions, complexities during the sprint: reduce them!
You planned wrong: why? Were you forced to, by people outside of your team? Put the decision making back to the team, where it belongs. Nobody else.
Embarrassment at the review? Don’t cover it up because no one will learn from it. Dont fix something in secret over the weekend. Someone will not notice something was ever wrong.
I started doing Scrum more than 15 years ago and I’ve worked on teams with full-time Scrum masters / project managers where the team genuinely did want to make the process work, but I have yet to be on a team where we did Scrum and figured out how to make it run like a well-oiled machine.
I have indeed failed and learned from countless sprints over the years, and the main thing I’ve learned is that time-boxing doesn’t work. I have had success with Kanban / “Scrumban” that dispenses with the time-boxing, but does have planning, pointing, stand-up, retrospectives, backlog grooming, review and demo, etc.
I guess I fundamentally reject the idea that a team should be able to plan and estimate weeks worth of work and if everything doesn’t go according to plan, then you did something wrong and need to figure out how to do better next time. Software development is design, which is always going involve a lot of exploration and learning, not manufacturing, so things not going according to plan is normal because if you’re doing it right, then you’re more knowledgeable today than when you made the plan weeks ago.
With Kanban, if a 3-point story runs into unforeseen issues and you end up spending an extra day, no big deal. Maybe someone will even swarm on it with you. With Scrum, if that happens one or more times, you’re either putting in extra hours or not fulfilling your commitment for the sprint.
The problem is that committing to a fixed scope in a fixed timeframe with a fixed team size is always bad idea, and Scrum makes an entire process out of this bad practice. It’s an improvement compared to full-on waterfall, but it’s still a flawed process, and getting rid of the time-boxing makes all the difference in my experience.
Scrum as mini waterfall isn’t supposed to happen, but it usually does. The idea is everyone can help the people will are currently busy
The problem is test and build can’t do much to help the system analysts; the analysts and testers can’t help build because they don’t usually know how to code, so all that happens is everyone tests when build is done
As an analyst I don’t do any testing because I had a bad team leader in a past job as a function tester which soured me on the job, so it’s pretty much mini waterfall to me
the mini waterfall is kind of the intention of a sprint. The whole idea is to reduce the huge waterfall and its horrible surprises at the end when it is way too late. Have those surprises early by doing small waterfalls. But everybody is splitting it wrong so all the small waterfalls have no outcome until the whole thing is done, just like you do without sprints.
Scrum feels like a miniature waterfall. In the worst cases, a sprint is a race to make something that won’t be embarrassing at review and demo on Friday, and then you finish it over the weekend because it’s getting released Monday (with an incident in prod on Tuesday because you had to half-ass some things). Afterwards, the SM is nagging you to enter your actuals in JIRA “so we can track velocity”.
Kanban is better in my experience since it at least does away with arbitrary deadlines, while still encouraging practices like backlog grooming and breaking down work into small units that can be completed in a week or less and then shipped. If you do a group pointing session and the consensus is that it’s going to take more than a few days, you go back and break it down further. If you run into issues with a work item and it takes a little longer than expected, no biggie, because quality is speed, unlike with Scrum where back-to-back sprints would force you to be working in the next thing because you’re now in a new sprint and last sprint’s work should’ve already been done. Didn’t you already show that in review and demo, so why are you still working on it?
You can actually see sprints as mini-Waterfalls. But the point is to fail and learn from it. I am sorry you had no Scrum Master with responsibility. Not finished on Friday? So be it! Find out why and try a solution. You had distractions, complexities during the sprint: reduce them! You planned wrong: why? Were you forced to, by people outside of your team? Put the decision making back to the team, where it belongs. Nobody else.
Embarrassment at the review? Don’t cover it up because no one will learn from it. Dont fix something in secret over the weekend. Someone will not notice something was ever wrong.
I started doing Scrum more than 15 years ago and I’ve worked on teams with full-time Scrum masters / project managers where the team genuinely did want to make the process work, but I have yet to be on a team where we did Scrum and figured out how to make it run like a well-oiled machine.
I have indeed failed and learned from countless sprints over the years, and the main thing I’ve learned is that time-boxing doesn’t work. I have had success with Kanban / “Scrumban” that dispenses with the time-boxing, but does have planning, pointing, stand-up, retrospectives, backlog grooming, review and demo, etc.
I guess I fundamentally reject the idea that a team should be able to plan and estimate weeks worth of work and if everything doesn’t go according to plan, then you did something wrong and need to figure out how to do better next time. Software development is design, which is always going involve a lot of exploration and learning, not manufacturing, so things not going according to plan is normal because if you’re doing it right, then you’re more knowledgeable today than when you made the plan weeks ago.
With Kanban, if a 3-point story runs into unforeseen issues and you end up spending an extra day, no big deal. Maybe someone will even swarm on it with you. With Scrum, if that happens one or more times, you’re either putting in extra hours or not fulfilling your commitment for the sprint.
The problem is that committing to a fixed scope in a fixed timeframe with a fixed team size is always bad idea, and Scrum makes an entire process out of this bad practice. It’s an improvement compared to full-on waterfall, but it’s still a flawed process, and getting rid of the time-boxing makes all the difference in my experience.
Scrum as mini waterfall isn’t supposed to happen, but it usually does. The idea is everyone can help the people will are currently busy
The problem is test and build can’t do much to help the system analysts; the analysts and testers can’t help build because they don’t usually know how to code, so all that happens is everyone tests when build is done
As an analyst I don’t do any testing because I had a bad team leader in a past job as a function tester which soured me on the job, so it’s pretty much mini waterfall to me
the mini waterfall is kind of the intention of a sprint. The whole idea is to reduce the huge waterfall and its horrible surprises at the end when it is way too late. Have those surprises early by doing small waterfalls. But everybody is splitting it wrong so all the small waterfalls have no outcome until the whole thing is done, just like you do without sprints.