| >The person I was replying to sounds like they are on a bad team/project where people use their estimates to blame/finger point, and they are ascribing this to scrum as if the team wouldnt be doing this otherwise. Every time you try and infer what I'm "really" saying or what "really" happened to me you get it completely wrong. Next time you do that just assume that you're wrong, it'll save us both time. The blame/finger pointing on my projects wasn't really external (although in a different environment it certainly could have been). Developers themselves felt bad about missing their 'commitments'. The pressure/blame was largely self-inflicted. Despite feeling bad the predictions were still consistently optimistic and still consistently wrong due to the environment the predictions were made in. It was a bug in the scrum process that led this to happen, but the team and management (and you, apparently) would rather assign blame to anything else other than a bug in their methodology. >The analysis comes in discovering the velocity. Velocity isn't a useful metric. >This is the method for getting confidence in your estimate. Except it doesn't work. It didn't work for us and it probably doesn't work for anybody else. Confidence in estimates means treating risk and uncertainty as if it is real rather than sweeping it under the carpet, like it is in scrum. Confidence means a prediction process that doesn't make developers feel guilty about being wrong, like it does with scrum 'commitments'. Confidence a prediction process that doesn't intentionally subject developers to groupthink and peer pressure by immediately putting them on the spot like scrum planning pt 2 does. Confidence means that your estimation process itself should be mutable. Under scrum it is fixed and not subject to review (if you change it you're doing "Scrum-but" and that's a sin, according to scrum trainers). Most of all, confidence means that you should be able to inject technical debt cleanup stories into the sprint that derisk future changes. Scrum says that's only allowed if the PO says it's allowed. The PO is not responsible for missed commitments though, so it's not their problem. |