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by cmdkeen
4083 days ago
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Well there is an interesting concept - you're talking about jargon like "sprints" yet referring to "Agile" which is a very, very broad church. I like Scrum for the power of the retrospective, if people actually talk about issues, the the team really is empowered you can change those problems:
a) Talk through how to handle bugs. There is no prescriptive answer, if you have a problem with defects then fix it, or develop a system to deal with them. You don't have to bring a bug into sprint after all, and if you do then get your Project Owner to drop an equivalent bit of work out.
b) Refinement is a crucial part of the process, if you can't break up the task into 1/2 weeks worth of work for a team odds are you don't fully understand the task, which means you can't provide forward estimation, which means management can't trust you're numbers.
c) "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum, so a PM consultant guiding you on agile feels very, very wrong. If your organisation can't commit to you working full (pretty much) time on a project working on a set of things that have been committed to without pulling you in another direction then odds are Scrum isn't going to work for you. Scrum is very clear that there are certain things you need to do in order to say you're doing Scrum. Doing "Agile" screams following no particular sub methodology but cobbling something together. There's nothing wrong with that evolving, but it helps to be able to describe why you've gone in that direction. In your case it seems like you've had something foisted on you by external people talking out of their rear. |
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See, this is the thing: on the one hand it's supposed to be all about committing to a specific direction ahead of time and not letting yourself be pulled somewhere else -- on the other hand it's supposed to be all about developers being empowered to work on what's most important at the moment (I mean it's right there built into the name!) Those seem in direct conflict.
We don't have organizational pressure pulling us in different directions -- we have reality pulling us in different directions. I'm not going to tell a customer "no, you can't have that bug fix or that new feature yet, we have a Methodology to follow."
> "Project Managers" don't exist in Scrum.
Right. Just project owners, product owners, scrum masters....
> In your case it seems like you've had something foisted on you by external people talking out of their rear.
I think you're onto something there. (They keep changing their minds, too: one week it's fibonacci sizing, next week it's T-shirt sizes. One week it's scrums, next week it's kanban. The actual working process seems to stay the same, only the jargon shifts around.)