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I've been doing SCRUM development for 4 weeks now and it feels like a huge waste of time. Here is a short list of complaints.
1. Would any self organizing team of developers actually plan to meet every day?
2. About half of the 15 minute morning morning consists of, "Lets have a Meet After to Discuss". Half the team stays after the meeting every day. How about just discussing it now and getting it over with?
3. The other half of our 15 minute morning meetings is just to state that the status hasn't changed from yesterday
I'll give it more time, but I'm not expecting much.
Hogan
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snorkie wrote: 1. Would any self organizing team of developers actually plan to meet every day?
Yes. The longer you leave it between people talking, the more chance you have for things going wrong, and the SCRUM shouldn't just be the developers. What about your testers? Tech writers? They need to be involved because they need to hear what is being said just in case you are changing things.
snorkie wrote: 2. About half of the 15 minute morning morning consists of, "Lets have a Meet After to Discuss". Half the team stays after the meeting every day. How about just discussing it now and getting it over with?
Better known as, let's waffle on about an issue for an hour or two and completely bore those who aren't involved. The standup is purely there to give people an update on what's just gone on, and what is coming up in the future along with what's preventing you from delivering.
snorkie wrote: 3. The other half of our 15 minute morning meetings is just to state that the status hasn't changed from yesterday
So no one delivers anything? Your units of work should be small enough that you can see progress in short spaces of time.
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So you're saying we have room for improvement 
Pete O'Hanlon wrote: Yes. The longer you leave it between people talking, the more chance you have for things going wrong, and the SCRUM shouldn't just be the developers. What about your testers? Tech writers? They need to be involved because they need to hear what is being said just in case you are changing things.
All of those people are in the meeting. It just doesn't seem like anything is done. Our meeting is forced to quick updates where we are at and nothing else being discussed.
Pete O'Hanlon wrote: Better known as, let's waffle on about an issue for an hour or two and completely bore those who aren't involved. The standup is purely there to give people an update on what's just gone on, and what is coming up in the future along with what's preventing you from delivering.
Yes, many people are lazy and try to use meetings to get out of work. However, we're so early in development that I think we need some level of "group think" to get on the same page. This could be done with time boxing to ensure it doesn't go too far off topic.
Pete O'Hanlon wrote: So no one delivers anything? Your units of work should be small enough that you can see progress in short spaces of time.
In terms of delivering, we have a meeting at the end of the SCRM to show what was done. This seems too little too late to me, but our SCRUM expert set it up this way.
I know it can be done well, but we have not figured it out yet.
Hogan
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snorkie wrote: Yes, many people are lazy and try to use meetings to get out of work.
I don't think that's what Pete is saying.
Meetings count as committees, and the IQ of any committee is the IQ of the lowest member divided by the number of members. As soon as discussion starts, the meeting will go on and on, and on, and will cover subjects that just aren't relevant to anyone else: hence the idea of a scrum meeting being stand up, short and sweet - only the essentials are touched on - so you all know what is going on and what is causing problems. They aren't meant to propose solutions or discuss alternatives, just update everybody on status.
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
English doesn't borrow from other languages.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
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As OG states, what I'm saying is that meetings tend to be counterproductive. Without strict control, they do have a tendency to wander all over the place, and the meeting is at the mercy of the people with the biggest agendas, and the loudest voices. That's not a way to handle a status update.
What most SCRUM environments tend to do is operate in sprints. At the start of a sprint, all the items that haven't been completed are up for grabs, and the meeting is used to decide on what you are going to do this sprint. This is the opportunity to bring forward your backlog from previous sprints; to get a common understanding of what you're going to attempt to deliver this sprint, and to get updates on areas that need further clarification. It's fairly common practice to give some high level estimates to each item and to allocate tasks (I tend to assume that people will only be about 70% allocated to these tasks), so if I were to allocate 80 hours per person over a fortnight, I'd only look to give them about 7 days of tasks (note that this isn't 7 days of development). The reality, of course, is that you wouldn't allocate 80 hours because you need time to wrap up each sprint, so over 10 days, I would expect the last day to be tidying up loose ends and doing a post-sprint release.
At the end of each sprint, you might opt to have a sprint review. This is the opportunity to say what went well; where the pain points are, and what can be done to improve things for the next sprint.
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I have bookmarked this. I am really trying to write a sensible [for a given value of sensible] guide to SCRUM that can be used effectively to get people to understand what they are doing.
To me an underlying principle of all Agile methodologies is that they must get rid of fluff, and in return increase productivity and quality.
speramus in juniperus
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I'm looking forward to that article; coming from SDM I'm still not convinced that agile has any benefits. To me it sounds like a generalization of idea's on how to cut a corner.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: To me an underlying principle of all Agile methodologies is that they must get
rid of fluff,
That is part of the process of all process control methodologies that I have seen.
Nagy Vilmos wrote: and in return increase productivity and quality.
That is part the goal of all process control methodologies that I have seen.
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This is the video I got our guys to watch[^]
It was a waste of time as I continually get "I know we're doing it wrong but we can't change it" response - but I think it's 10 minutes well spent for anyone who is interested in Agile development.
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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I enjoyed it, even with the blatant ad in the middle of the presentation.
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The thing that I've noticed is that the goal of this method of development is to show progress, no matter what the cost. I've seen numerous times where doing something the right way and preparing for maintainability and expandability is thrown by the wayside and even ridiculed in the effort to meet "goals". So when it comes time for the next sprint, the work that was just completed is thrown out, or totally rewritten, and what is usually ended up with is patchwork code because we didn't have the time to do it right.
In my opinion, I see this method as a unguided accumulation of technical debt that may or may not ever get paid.
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That is not really the fault of SCRUM, but more an erroneous use of it.
speramus in juniperus
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: That is not really the fault of SCRUM, but more an erroneous use of it.
And incorrect use of other process control methodologies lead to bad results as well.
But my experience is that in a very large percentage of cases process methodologies are used incorrectly.
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snorkie wrote:
2. About half of the 15 minute morning morning consists of, "Lets have a Meet After to Discuss".
Reminds me of one of the Google commercials.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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SCRUM, it would seem, was derived from SCAM, SCRAP, or more likely, SCROTUM.
Just sayin' . . .
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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LOL 
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As I heard it, scrum comes from rugby. Like in American football, the team goes into a huddle. Rugby, it is called a scrum.
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What you need is a simple to understand definition[^].
SCRUM works, and works well, as long as you accept it. The greatest impediment is members of the team trying to work around or outside of the sprint. Once that happens things go FUBAR.
The stand-up has three questions - "What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What help will need?" - anything outside of this does not belong in the stand-up.
speramus in juniperus
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SCRUM works, and works well, as long as you accept it.
That's what my pastor told me about religion.
Religion works, and works well, as long as you accept it.
Interesting....
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No matter how you call your "product development strategy/process", some people just prefer wasting time to actually doing their jobs.
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snorkie wrote: 2. About half of the 15 minute morning morning consists of, "Lets have a Meet After to Discuss". Half the team stays after the meeting every day. How about just discussing it now and getting it over with?
One of the big purposes of SCRUM is to communicate amongst the team members, including with a stakeholder representative. One of the features of this is the very important detail of communication. If you are triggering something where people realize that a subgroup needs to meet every day about some detail, then this aspect of scrum is working the way it should.
This also keeps the stakeholder aware that there are problems to be solved, and they are being solved or at least identified. This goes a long way in avoiding surprises towards the end of the project.
You need to give it more time.
Windows 8 is the resurrected version of Microsoft Bob. The only thing missing is the Fisher-Price logo.
- Harvey
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I'll give it more time, cause I like my job! However, I have yet to personally realize benefits from SCRUM. I feel that valuable communication is lost because the meeting is limited to the three questions. I feel like I'm living in a law drama where developers are lawyers having to have sidebars all of the time. We're all friends here, and can discuss issues in front of everybody.
Hogan
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There should be nothing stopping you from talking to your colleagues outside of the stand up to further discuss issues.
If there are things which are a problem and could stop the team delivering working software then the standup is the place to raise this since everybody who is interested in the project succeeding should be there, however, it isn't the place for a full blown discussion of an issues.
One of the main things about any agile process is visibility into what's happening, so what work people are doing, how the project is progressing, problems, etc but depending on size of your team(s) not everybody present may need to participate in discussions about specifics so having "sidebars" is the right thing to do.
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nathans.dropbox@googlemail.com wrote: One of the main things about any agile process is visibility into what's
happening
I haven't seen any popularized process control methodology where that wasn't a goal as well.
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On top of other answers, it seems like issue with either team or definition of done/planning:
- is your team ( i mean team: devs, testers and writers) sitting in one room? IF not, try to sit them down close to each other. They will have a plenty of opportunities to communicate outside stand-up. Helps a lot.
- keep rigor on stand-up - just 3 questions, status and go to after discussions. I've seen failed introductions of SCRUM just because stand-ups got too long and people were just tired of too long status meetings
- items - seems like stuff is little too complex, task granularity is too large or guys do not have much experience... whatever, I can only guess. Try out with one-two items, split it into really small tasks with clear definition of done, see if it reduces number of after stand-up discussions. Be aware - SCRUM is also about constant code refactoring, sometimes it's even 3rd or 4th iteration on the same part of code, that produces functionality satisfying most requirements.
One person brought up important topic - open talk about one's problems. It takes experienced/good at 'soft skills' moderator to make team comfortable about telling of own flaws and drawbacks. Just one rule, yet very important - never allow it to have at least shadow of getting personal, always cut to the chase and disregard/ignore comments outside of subject.
There is no magic, golden triangle quality/time/cost requires constant corrective actions, be it cutting the scope or extending the deadline or decision like 'now we need to refactor to get better performance/make more extendible architecture'. Keep focused on use cases, which constitue 80%-90% of normal usage of software, patch corner cases or just avoid them by design limiting delivered functionality - from my experience developers tend to spend a lot of time (and cost in company terms) to cover all cases possible, instead focusing on the basic ones.
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