Do teams still use scrum and sprints? I have been out of the software development system for many years now but I can remember how awful scrum and sprints were, like a race to see who could write the worst possible software. Recently I heard the term again and wondered if it was still a thing? |
The majority of the teams are actually doing morning meetings which they call “stand-ups” even though everyone is sitting in the conference room or at home, working remotely, and go around the table updating the status. Sometimes these meetings are daily, sometimes every other day or so.
Some teams have some kind of sprint review once every 2 or 3 or 4 weeks which involves a somewhat deeper discussion of the open and closed work items.
That's as much as people call “scrum” and “sprint” around me.
Those 2 instances were actually pretty enjoyable, educational and very productive team work.
I don't see that anymore these days. I only see teams adopting bits of it (mostly "sprints" idea) without actually trying to make the whole thing work. To some degree - WFH was the last nail in the coffin.
To be fair modern big tech are not made for this. Overwhelming levels of bureacracy, accidental complexity, cross org friction just ruins the "agile" ideas and intended dynamics.
If a team is coming from something more like the DoD's horrific Waterfall world, then Scrum is probably an improvement but it needs to be seen as a stepping stone, not a destination in itself. It has many problems of its own.
Managers may or may not run daily or weekly 'check-ins' (I've never been on a team that did daily ones), there were no points assigned, there were very rough guesse of how long projects would take, but management just assumed people didn't need babysitting and people would work hard when necessary to unblock other folks.
you have people doing 50 things at the same time, then stuff piles up and gets annoying af to manage, and people then have to put what they're working on to the side and address that clog.
just do one thing at a time (you can be doing 10 different projects, but each person should be doing ONE thing with the goal of getting it DONE).
It wasn't that I had some big title and leadership role. That was just how little the process mattered to leadership. Every engineer on the team had their own little empire to run. I, and everyone else on that team, got good reviews not because of any metrics we hit, but because we could handle being thrown a system and just run with it, so the leadership never had to get into the weeds.
We did have formal change control processes - a tedious weekly meeting where we'd all go over what changes were going in to be sure we didn't step on each other. So it was a mix of utter freedom with one painful touchpoint each week. Not a bad price to pay, honestly.
All that being said, I disagree that Scrum or other Agile processes don't exist in large companies. They do. Some people like them. I personally don't mind Kanban, but detest Scrum. But when you are allowed to control your own process, there is no telling what people will choose to do.