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Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

1. Scrum sprints have all sorts of goofy restrictions, that you don't need to waste time on with a true-agile process. You don't need to plan out exactly two weeks. You don't need to worry about having too much or too little work in the sprint.

2. Scrum requires you to break things down pointlessly, when really most teams can execute on higher level goals.

3. Teams do not need to meet for a standup every day.

4. Effort estimates can be extremely approximate and wrong, but scrum tries to force you to spend way too much time on them.

The "plan" in a non-scrum environment is much better at focusing on what matters, rather than ticking all the scrum boxes.

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You can do anything badly. Like point one, no you don't need to plan out exactly two weeks. You estimate what you want to get done in two weeks and then at the end you see how close you got.

It's supposed to be a reality check to see how well estimates are matching up to actual effort. Which I don't really see why you shouldn't do something like that.

Our pointing sessions sometimes last 1.5 hours and involve the whole team regardless of expertise. Just imagine how much money we are wasting to determine: is this story a 1 point or 2 point story.

Goes back to the original point. If you do something badly then it's no surprise the results are suboptimal.

Yeah but if we do it well I still have to sit through a 1.5 hour retro. My therapy sessions are shorter.

I'd say 95% of sprint ceremonies I'm in are a complete waste of time. Still, amen for WFH.

Again, goes back to the point of you can do anything poorly. Ours are 30-60 minutes and usually have good conversations about issues the team sees. More often than not meaningful change comes out of it.

You're having 60 minutes of issues every few weeks? And you think something isn't done poorly? That's way too long.

The only meaningful change I ever saw come out of a "retro" was making daily standups async twice a week (done over Slack.) Then the manager didn't like that, so it was rolled back.

Most of the retros I'd just roll my eyes at. "What can we do differently?" cancel the retros...

Haha. Tell them we can't do anything differently because that would mess up the meticulous Jira/Agile flow we've setup in other meetings and have affirmed in retros.

Pretty sure I said 30-60 minutes. We also don't just talk about issues. We talk about wins and things that go well too.

I'm pretty sure 60 is within 30-60.

> We talk about wins and things that go well too.

It's a tactic for managers to feel better about themselves. Look, the team is expressing gratitude! I'm a success as a manager! If you want to thank someone message them on Slack. We don't need a 30 (or 60) minute meeting for an enforced feel good moment.

>I'm pretty sure 60 is within 30-60.

Uh hu, but since I gave a range obviously we don't have 60 minutes of issues every week. If I meant that, I would have said we have 60 minutes of issues every week instead of giving a range for the meeting length.

>It's a tactic for managers to feel better about themselves. Look, the team is expressing gratitude! I'm a success as a manager! If you want to thank someone message them on Slack. We don't need a 30 (or 60) minute meeting for an enforced feel good moment.

You're projecting so hard here.

(1) We didn't have a manager for a couple months now and retros went on unchanged.

(2) Talking about wins isn't an enforced feel good moment. It's about identifying things that worked well so that the team can continue doing them.

Your position is extreme and not everyone feels the same as you.

I am giving my experience and you call it projecting? That’s an interesting debate tactic.

The team doesn’t constantly need to reinforce what is working. That is self-evident and could be an email or slack message.

I’m done with this thread.

>I am giving my experience and you call it projecting? That’s an interesting debate tactic.

Taking your experience and making definitive statements is the definition of projection.

>The team doesn’t constantly need to reinforce what is working. That is self-evident and could be an email or slack message.

So you say. Obviously other people disagree

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