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Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

Wow... this question and the responses really make me realize how little I know about working with teams on projects.

I had to go find descriptions for "Agile", "Scrum", and "Cargo Cult".

I thought software project management would consist of outlining a feature set, selecting the tools to implement it, designing an API, delegating who builds what and the order they work on it, estimating time to delivery, setting goals and monitoring progress, having scheduled meetings to discuss problems and solutions, and an "It's Shipped Party" when the product has been delivered.

No one's even mentioned a shipping "Party" :D

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Oh, there's a ship party built into the Process, alright. It's called the sprint restrospective, and everyone sits around and argues for an hour about what went badly during the sprint.

Even more fun is the sprint retrospective retrospective, where everyone argues for two hours about what went wrong in the sprint retrospective.

I wish I was making that up.

Edit: it's not that I don't get the point of retrospectives, I do...but I've seen them taken to comically absurd levels, and in any sizable team it always seems to be the three people that care the most about their particular flavor of Scrum that sit around arguing about how much better it was the way they did it at their last company, meanwhile everyone else just wants to leave and get back to work. A small number of loud people will always have strong but completely arbitrary and anecdotal opinions about process, and in my opinion it's not healthy to give them a regular spot on everyone's schedule to complain about it.

Wow, sprint retrospective retrospective sounds nightmarish. I've never worked in a team nearly that dysfunctional, but I wonder if the blame is due to agile, or perhaps that team would end making any process or system into a horrorshow. It may even be that the agile process provides at least some bounds to the effects of the dysfunction, if it prevents such discussions occurring otherwise in the workday.

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