A quick rant about weaknesses of agile

  • mspencer712@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Do you keep a shopping list? A personal to-do or reminders list? You should stop because that’s a ritual and rituals are clearly bad.

    I mean, no, you should keep the rituals that help you work better and discard the rest. Which is what successful agile teams are already doing.

    • btaf45@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      you should keep the rituals that help you work better and discard the rest.

      For those using Scrum, that means keep backlog list and discard everything else.

      • TerrorBite :veripawed3:@meow.social
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        1 year ago

        @btaf45 @mspencer712 The whole point of Scrum is to use the retrospective to stop doing what doesn't work and start doing what does.

        At one point, when my team's workload changed to less-timeboxable work, we threw out the entire concept of sprints and just used kanban instead, and stayed like that for a year. We still did retrospectives on the old sprint cadence though.

        • computertoucher5000@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          I jokingly suggested a similar crusade against sprints, because the nature of my team's work isn't prohibitively time-boxed either.

          Wasn't expecting the people sitting on that zoom call with the power and influence to make such a change to actually agree

        • btaf45@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The whole point of Scrum is to use the retrospective to stop doing what doesn't work and start doing what does.

          That is only something useful if you can use the retrospective to through out Scrum. Otherwise it is yet another Scrum timewaster.

          • TerrorBite :veripawed3:@meow.social
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            1 year ago

            @btaf45 in my case, we as a team could have done that, because we didn't have management dictating how we did anything. It was our choice to do what worked for us, and it was a valuable tool for dealing with whatever got thrown at us.

            Now I'm working in a different place that dictates Agile and Scrum to be done Their Way, on top of a project that's largely waterfall-like to begin with, and I'm starting to see why people say it doesn't work.

            It works, BUT, only when you're using it as the right tool for the right job and not when management decide to misapply it as a hot new planning methodology.

        • nous@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          One of my project managers once described scrum as agile with training wheels. Which I think is a good description. It is useful for teams new to agile but once you get going you can start to throw out the parts that you don't need or that don't work for your team. But still useful to get you going initially.