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moose-mousse · 2 months

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Next up! Scrum!

So... this may be a controversial post... I swear, no listen, I SWEAR that is not on purpose nor is it a goal. I hate that nonsense, but I wanted to give you a heads up. If people start talks in the replies or the reposts, be kind. Read the entire post, and their answers and consider their context before engaging in a constructive manner, or decide you have nothing to say that will improve things. And remember the hermeneutics of generosity. (Basically, assume the writer means well, and is just not good at getting their point across) https://nerdfighteria.info/v/ovrzKCQ2JTM/

I say this because entire books have been written about how to do scrum... which I personally consider somewhat insane. And it is my opinion that a lot of this is just the business management consulting scammers that again have taken perfectly good systems, concepts and words and abused them to the point of meaninglessness.

Because scrum is SIMPLE. And great BECAUSE it is simple. A bit harder than agile, but then, usually the way to the goal IS harder than defining the goal, so that checks out. So just like my post on agile, let us start with what problem is scrum trying to solve.

Basically, a company wants to be more agile. But just bursting open a door, pointing to some random developers while yelling "BE AGILE" proved a somewhat ineffective strategy (except for Steve, who immediately did a full split). To be agile you want the development team to decide how they want to do development... so what do you do when they don't know themselves? You do scrum!

Scrum (Named after the "All players grab each-others shoulders and listen to a super quick message by the coach" thing in sportsball) is a plan for how to plan development, analyze how you are doing development, and improve it. It centers around a team of developers (Usually between 4-8) and a constant time period called a sprint. This is usually 1-3 weeks. Then you do these steps: 1: Make a plan for the next sprint. Take the tasks that needs doing, break them down into clear tasks, and hand them out to people. Try to get the amount of work given to each developer as close to the amount of time they have to work on it in the sprint. Write these things down, however you want. 2: Do the sprint! Basically, do development. Each day, have a super short meeting where each developer explains what they did yesterday, and what they plan to do today. With focus on decisions they have made. Each person talks for 1-3 min. If you need to talk more, do it with the specific people you need AFTER this meeting. 3: When the sprint is over, evaluate how the sprint went. This is the most important part, and the one that should be spend the most time and effort on. Because this is the real core of SCRUM. Did everyone manage to do their tasks? Did some run out of things to do? Was certain tasks harder than expected? Why? What things we did could be improved? What things we did should be done differently, or not at all?

You write down your hypotheses, and start again at step 1 with making a plan for the next sprint, this time, with changes you want to test.

If you just realized that this is the very well known "fuck around and find out" or "The scientific method" as some nerds call it, then congratulations! You now understand Scrum at a deeper level than 90% of companies!

Now. There are 2 extra roles in the development team to make sure this method... you know, actually works 1: A scrum master. This is essentially just the poor sucker who makes sure that the team actually follows the plan, and remembers the steps that was agreed upon. They note down interesting things said during the daily meetings, the plan during the planning and the ideas and thoughts during the retrospective meeting. They are NOT a leader or manager. They do NOT dictate anything. Usually they are just a developer who have the magical skill "Being able to take notes and participate in the meeting at the same time" (I am a bit in awe of that skill).

2: A product owner. Sadly, developers have to actually make stuff, not just have fun. And the product owner is there to make sure that everything still centers around the correct goal. "To make great software for whoever wanted to software". If the team is developing software for a costumer outside the firm, then this is a representative of that firm. Ideally the specific person who ordered it. If they are making software based on orders by a manager or a marketing leader, then the product owner is that person. Only the person who wants the software knows what the software should be like. And humans are terrible at communicating so you do not want a game of telephone going on or the futile game of "Just have the costumer write down what they want the software to do, and then we make it". Because the product owner is often busy and so it is ok for them to only show up at the planning and retrospective meetings and it is ok for them to video call in, but their participation is MANDATORY. They MUST be an active part of the meetings or none of this will work.

We want the team to make changes to how they develop, and what they develop on the fly (The developers decide how, they product owners what). And if you do that without a constant line to the product owner, the project will go off the rail very quickly and fail with almost 100% certainty. It is also a great help because not only will the developers be able to get questions answered quickly, the product owner will also get a good insight into how the thing they want are actually being made and make better decisions. Wrong assumptions will be caught early, and misunderstandings minimized. Maybe a thing they want is really hard to do. If they want it enough, then maybe the hard work is worth it. Maybe not. You find out by TALKING.

That is it. That is Scrum. Now, you may already have spottet why so many people get confused on what scrum is, or how specific or expansive it is. Because what scrum is, is a super simple setup, designed to mutate, and test if those mutations are good. Meaning after a while, a team may only have the short meetings every other day. Or have tasks given to sub-teams of 2-3 developers. Or drop the daily meeting and have Sprints that last half a week. Or have moved some of their developers to teams that fits them better, and gotten developers that like the way THIS team works. Or maybe they have a extra meeting in every sprint with a select group of people outside the team that are experienced in working with what the team is currently working on. Or maybe a team does not want to do any part of basic scrum.

And none of these are right or wrong . The ONLY thing that matters is "Does it work for THIS team?".

You may think "But you just described a structure with rules that seem rather strict...". Correct! That is the STARTING point. Meaning very few teams will be running exactly like that, because most teams (hopefully) did not just recently start existing.

But sometimes you also want a reset. A team may not be working well anymore. Maybe some key team members have left the company or gotten other jobs. And it is decided that it is easier to go back to basic scrum and start inventing a new way to do things for the current team. Maybe the team think they might be a bit too used to a current way of doing things to come up with a new one. Maybe the team is dissolved, and its members put into other teams, and a new team is created in its stead to start from basic scrum with individuals from other teams that wants to try new ways of doing things. It is perfect scrum to have a team of veteran developers who have not changed how they develop things in several years because they by now know what they want.

You can easily see why this works, and why it is good. Because if a part is not efficient or the team hates it? Then get rid of it. And it is easy to see why Scrum helps a company become agile. It is a tool that facilitates the worker empowerment and grassroots decisions that agile set as a goal.

You can also see why many companies HATES this. It makes a lot of middle managers unnecessary. It empowers workers to want things, and trains them on how to get them. It stops managers from coming up with "brilliant" new ways to develop software and then force that method onto the developers. Managers who come up with ideas for products will have to explain themselves to the developers, and risk looking silly. In front of the pleb workers!!!. Dear god, costumers will get to see the greasy reality of how the software they want is made! And management have to knowledge that developers are the best at... developing.... And will have to... trust their workers...

A thing you will often hear in defense of not letting teams decide on how to develop, is that if everyone develops in different ways, then nothing will be standardized. Each team may use different tools, languages and architectures! It will be a massive mess!

Which is true... if you completely miss the point. Again, the developers should be free to choose HOW to develop. Not WHAT to develop. The product owner is the major force in deciding what features and products is developed, and standards like code format or use of profiling tools can still be required by management (Which is entirely reasonable).

But the teams get to choose HOW they develop those. A simple example, many people like placing brackets like this: void MyFunction(){ // some code }

But my team prefer doing void MyFunction() { // some code } The idea in scrum, is NOT to allow a team to go "We write however we want!". The idea is "WE decide how we get to the required form". I have worked in a team that simply had a auto-formater build into each of the team members command line tools, so when they pushed to the remote git repo, the code format followed the standard, and when THEY looked at it, it looked how the team preferred it to look. I have seen teams that wanted to work in a different language, so they used a Source-to-source compiler in much the same way.

That is scrum. It is a simple, yet powerful idea.

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