<story><title>Why Scrum is stressing you out</title><url>https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/why-scrum-is-stressing-you-out</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maximumgeek</author><text>I think back to the early 2000&amp;#x27;s, and there are other factors in play as well. Back then, I worked with a team of engineers that stayed together for over 4 years. In that time, we did not have Project Managers telling us to do daily standups. We met as an engineering team.&lt;p&gt;We often would go days without having a formal meeting.&lt;p&gt;But, software was different then as well. Everything is interconnected now. One team dropping the ball affects countless other teams. Deployments were whenever we felt a new one was due or at a multi month cadence. Did this introduce problems, yes, but at the same time, they came in controlled release cycles.&lt;p&gt;Nothing against CI&amp;#x2F;CD and continuous delivery, but the hamster wheel has gotten to a point where we have to release all the time. Corners are cut on everything, and testing is given lip service.&lt;p&gt;At this point, I am a manager, and SCRUM stresses me out. Either let us work from a queue, or give us a project with a deadline. Give me back a stupid gant or pert chart. At least then it was, is this done to allow XYZ, not we are going to accomplish this in the next 2 (arbitrary) weeks.&lt;p&gt;So much more to say, but I am toast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregmac</author><text>&amp;gt; Nothing against CI&amp;#x2F;CD and continuous delivery, but the hamster wheel has gotten to a point where we have to release all the time. Corners are cut on everything, and testing is given lip service.&lt;p&gt;Just to call it out: Having CI&amp;#x2F;CD doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you have to do all these things, or do scrum. It&amp;#x27;s imho just good engineering practice. I have it in my side projects, and I&amp;#x27;ve had it at work on a Kanban-driven team (as well as on scrum).&lt;p&gt;It removes disputes over build  process (eg, nobody can ever say &amp;quot;well, it complies on my machine&amp;quot;). It is a form of build&amp;#x2F;deploy documentation. It removes bottlenecks (&amp;quot;only Tom knows how to deploy that service, but he&amp;#x27;s on vacation&amp;quot;) and stupid mistakes (&amp;quot;whoever deployed this last did it wrong and left a bunch of old files around&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;I also have found deploying regularly is stress-&lt;i&gt;reducing&lt;/i&gt;. For one, with CD the development environment is running the same steps, and we know it works because we do it dozens of times a week. The longer it&amp;#x27;s been since last prod deploy, the less confident we can be it&amp;#x27;ll go smoothly, whereas when it gets deployed every few days it becomes a non-event.&lt;p&gt;When something breaks, having only 1 or 3 changes makes it really easy to figure out why. Recovering after a big release with 40 PRs in it is absolutely painful.&lt;p&gt;None of this means you have to release &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; on a regular schedule (like a sprint). You can still do long running branches or feature-flag things off, Just try not to go too long without deploying &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Scrum is stressing you out</title><url>https://rethinkingsoftware.substack.com/p/why-scrum-is-stressing-you-out</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maximumgeek</author><text>I think back to the early 2000&amp;#x27;s, and there are other factors in play as well. Back then, I worked with a team of engineers that stayed together for over 4 years. In that time, we did not have Project Managers telling us to do daily standups. We met as an engineering team.&lt;p&gt;We often would go days without having a formal meeting.&lt;p&gt;But, software was different then as well. Everything is interconnected now. One team dropping the ball affects countless other teams. Deployments were whenever we felt a new one was due or at a multi month cadence. Did this introduce problems, yes, but at the same time, they came in controlled release cycles.&lt;p&gt;Nothing against CI&amp;#x2F;CD and continuous delivery, but the hamster wheel has gotten to a point where we have to release all the time. Corners are cut on everything, and testing is given lip service.&lt;p&gt;At this point, I am a manager, and SCRUM stresses me out. Either let us work from a queue, or give us a project with a deadline. Give me back a stupid gant or pert chart. At least then it was, is this done to allow XYZ, not we are going to accomplish this in the next 2 (arbitrary) weeks.&lt;p&gt;So much more to say, but I am toast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moribvndvs</author><text>In the nearly 30 years of doing this, I’ve had more success delivering good quality software that meets business requirements under waterfall than any of the SCRUM implementations I’ve worked with, and I am saying that without disagreeing that waterfall has its problems. In the agile space, kanban is the only one I’ve felt is productive, but it has trouble scaling to multiple teams.</text></comment>