[heisnotanalien]

Fuck Scrum. How many devs are saying this privately how much they hate scrum but have a work persona where they have to love it? It's so fucking toxic. It's just focus on doing a good job and get back to basics. Hire the right people, give them a lot of trust, some incentives to do a good job, and see what happens. Stop making out a methodology out of a freaking todo list.

[dale_glass]

I'm getting the impression that it's like Monopoly -- an overall solid idea that some people glue their own pet ideas to, or where they tack on pointless add-ons until it becomes unrecognizable.

I don't really see what's hateable in scrum, when done sensibly. Like what do you have?

1. Daily short, standup meetings just to make sure everyone is on the same page, nobody is terminally stuck, and everything is moving forward. Most of the time these are done in a few minutes and go by completely uneventfully.

2. Weekly plannings where the team figures out what to do next. That allows replying to real-world changes, or to adapt to team composition. Eg, if Bob, who knows everything there is about Postgres is on vacation, maybe we'll delay database related work until he returns.

3. Retrospective to see if everything is on track or things are getting badly bogged down somewhere. This is a good time to think about whether some feature will not make it at this rate, or such.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the core idea, and there's a lot you can adjust to your needs. If doing two week sprints is too much planning for you because all the tickets are long running, do it once a month instead.

[heisnotanalien]

I would suggest all this stuff will arise organically if you just hire the right people and give them some good principles of what good looks like. Like actually train people in leadership and other skills instead of just having a 'process'? I mean it when I say see what happens if you actually trust people and give them some freedom.

[ebiester]

Who are these people excited about scrum? Most of the scrum masters I know dislike it and would rather build ad-hoc from the agile toolbox. Scrum is popular because it's an easy-to-implement general process that enough people know.

Scrum is the duplo block of agile. That said, it doesn't have to be that heavy. A retrospective every other week, A sprint review every other week, a sprint planning every other week, and 15 minutes a day for standup.

So that's a half day block every other week and 15 minutes a day otherwise. It doesn't even need to be a half day block - our sprint plannings usually end up being 15 minutes because we work on refining tickets through the week.

My teams have 3-4 hours of standing meetings a week. We try to group them as much as possible to avoid dumb blocks of time. The vast majority of that time is going through the work together.

The vast majority of our meetings are making sure we are building the right thing. Reviewing the specification for gaps happens with development. You could say that that could be done asynchronously, and it does. But I think so much of the issue here is that people add more.

[chakintosh]

I'm a UX Designer and I despise scrum. It's a useless bunch of practices pushed by failed project managers to justify their salary. It does orders of magnitude more harm than good in software development.