Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it’s comments.
We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.
How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don’t even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D
I’ve never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I’ll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:
Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.
e.g. “The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows”
Quoting from some of the comments
That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.
This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like “JoBob I’ll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig” or “After standup I’d like to talk to the team about XYZ”. We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says “I couldn’t figure out how to schoop the woop, so I’m still working on that.” but again our scrum master will say “Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don’t we chat it out after stand up”.
I hate that paragraph but I can’t find a good place to break it up, sorry.
Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:
I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.
First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.
Second: There’s such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it’s a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to “type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit”.
Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren’t just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says “eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that”, we just suck it up and do it.
This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it’s crazy to me how ridiculous y’all make the process.
edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you’ll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that’s almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it’s our own fault when it happens to us.
as a scrummaster who pleads incessently with management to let me actually run scrum correctly, this hits home, and it makes me sad. I could chat for hours with you about how stupid people ruin the Agile process
While true, that cuts both ways, a successful team is not successful because of ‘scrum’, it’s successful because it finds a methodology that works for them, which can be in terms of scrum, but even if no one was chanting Agile buzzwords, that team would still self organize in a similar way, just without the precise buzzwords.
What’s obnoxious is that a lot of folks, with a vested interest in, say, consulting, will give credit to “Agile” for teams succeeding and then simultaneously call all failures that ostensibly use Agile but fail “not true Agile”. It can be harmless enough when self-organizing, but then it doesn’t really matter if it is “big-A Agile” or not. People hung up on the “big-A Agile” may be expecting to cash in with consultancy money, or use it as a club to assert their authority by their self-proclaimed alignment to ‘Agile’. They are advocating for Agile, therefore if you challenge anything about their direction, they will invoke the magic Agile word to silence criticism about their methods. Once an organization has “acheived Agile”, ironically they frequently close the door on any consideration of methodology reform. “We are running Agile now, whatever you may think we are doing wrong the industry agrees with us because the industry uses Agile, so stop complaining”.
So Agile may be technically workable, but the frustration is that it is vague enough to allow anyone to do almost anything and still ‘fairly’ claim Agile, but as a brand word it confers unreasonable authority for certain folks. As the most prominent brand word in the world of project management, it is further correlated with the ‘default’ asserted methodology of any crappy group looking toward consultancy/self-help to fix their bad team situation with a bandaid of methodology.
It should be seen as a method that can be adjusted to the team, but this attitude blocks adjustments and improvements even before they start. Its even worse, people will just do anything “Scrum” tells them and reflecting, especially learning from the previous lessons, gets silently lost since the impression overcomes, that it is not allowed. From management side this is fully approved, I mean these people are expensive Scrum Masters, so they know what they do.
As you mentioned the team is the source of success, not the method itself. The “Don’t” stated previously is on point there:
Yeah, this one is tricky.
If a methodology is supposed to help, but you don’t change your processes in any way, then it seems odd to assert that you are “adopting” a methodology.
In fact, I would say that the typical dysfunctional Agile shop basically “bends agile” to fit their process, meaning they undertake a superficial exercise to map a problematic process to Agile terms and declare victory. Sometimes taking the time to actually make the process worse in a way they wanted to, under the smoke screen of “Agile transition”. For example, in my company customers are generally using our projects together, so we had basically a set cadence of release dates. All projects were only allowed to target designated release days (March 1st, June 1st, etc.) A project, if it made sense could skip a release window, but the projects wouldn’t just release 2 weeks differently than all the related projects. Project owners declared this “not Agile” and said everyone just release whenever, much to the complaints to customers that now have a barrage of updates that are in no way synced up, with QA that tried to use the projects as the customer would abolished, so until the customer there’s no one using the “current” editions of the projects together in one place. Agile is perfectly happy with a prescribed cadence (in fact I would say usually I hear the mantra that you try to fit your work to the schedule, rather than letting the work mess up the schedule), but development managers didn’t like the way the release schedule tied their hands so they blamed Agile for a really bad quality move.
I’m all about processes that fit your team, I just think fixation on Agile branding does more harm than good.
Good points.
One of my measures of an agile team is simply asking if they’re agile.
I’ve never had an agile team say “yes, we’re agile”.
Best answer I’ve had was. “we do these standard agile things, we cheat in these ways that work for us, and we’re currently adopting this process that we think we’ll help”.
Worst answer was “Yes. We’re all SCRUM certified.”
Really appreciate your based and realistic comment, thank you! Sound like a cool place to work at and shows, it can work out good.
I think the tool is very powerful and a benefit for all, but only when used right. Actually I find myself or at least my thoughts in almost all of your points about basic shit.
Edit: either I fckd up or the app but my reply about the cult thing was not meant to be a reply to your description and sharing
It IS a great place to work, and I absolutely hate that 20 years ago I post under this handle on stuff like “Ubersite” about how “We should stop saying ‘sucks’ for negative things. How do we expect to get blowjobs if we keep saying bad things ‘suck dick’”. Like I just can’t tie that to my employer as much as I’d like to hype them up to dev/engineers online :p
I’m sure the internet super sleuths can figure it out, but I can’t imagine why they would bother :p
You didn’t mess it up, it wasn’t posted as a reply to me, I just saw it in other parts of the comments :)
We had daily 45min+ stand-up at my old place, averaged 10 minutes per person. That team just reaaally loved meeting. Code was in de facto maintenance mode, even though there was years-long backlog and a shit tons of reasons to rework on the code base. It is like they hated coding, manager was old and he enforced coding standard like it was the early 00s, no OOP, no abstraction, bo new language features. Anyway, I disgress.
I raised the issue with the 15-25 hours of meeting per week and how little was being done, which I swear, they said was because we did not do enough “admin” and scrum work, and doubled down on the process. We were now expected to take 30min per day to write down how we spent our time to present to the team each retro.
Job was technically easy, because, well, we did very little technical stuff. I always had hated useless meetings, but I always managed to have some input on how to spend my time in othrr jobs. Someday I felt like crying in the morning before opening the mandatory webcam, thinking about the next hour of meeting, and I quit right then, I never joined another call and I kepty resignation to emails.
Good job getting the fuck out, that place sounds full to the brim with batshit insane management.
I lost a pretty substantial amount in stock options, this is why I stuck around. I was afraid to regret this decision my whole life. Well, years later I can tell you best fucking decision of the decade. I can make the money back, maybe, but the small chips of soul I lost in that environment will never grow back.
Man if I had taken the fucking time to check which community this was post to, I could have saved myself a lot of typing since I wouldn’t have bothered with the comment section :D Good post tho!