Comment by dingosity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingosity | Hacker News Reader

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Heck. I came here to make essentially the same comment.

I miss the 90s when we did XP.

Another complaint I have about Scrum is its structure assumes you have a good idea of what you're trying to do. Agile was supposed to reduce the cost of design changes.

Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira. No one in my organization knows how to configure it because we don't want to pay to send the guy who manages it part time to training. And when we paid for the consultant, they asked all sorts of questions like 'how are your projects laid out?' and we said 'uh... we hired you to tell us how we should do that' and they said 'you need to know how your projects are laid out' and we said 'heck, batman, we don't even know what the hell we're really building because we're waaay early in the requirements gathering and design' and they said 'how cute, call me when you know what you're doing' and we said 'yeah... i think we can randomly click buttons on the Jira interface without your help' and our VP said 'we need to monetize our synergy by leveraging our learnings and develop asks for cross departmental interfaces' and i said 'absolutely, Bob, I'll just be over here writing a distributed map reduce function in Erlang' and my management chain said 'CI/CD is hard, let's just do GitFlow and hire interns to randomly type YAML files we upload to AWS' and at this time I tried to wake up but it was not a dream."

Which is to say... Scrum adds structure to the things that are easy to add structure to and seems to avoid having people think about the problems. You ABSOLUTELY can do Scrum without it devolving into a crap-fest, but it's not easy and you wind up using other tools, often without telling your management chain.

I sighed when I read that because it's so true.

One of the best decisions my org made was to hire a dedicated Scrum Master. She configures all our projects if we want her to and she knows exactly the problems to avoid, the right questions to ask about how she should configure things, how to set things up so it simplifies our monthly project budget reporting meetings, and generally keeps us honest during standups (you guys have really low velocity; are you being interrupted a lot?).

Possibly, the second best decision was to give individual projects the option to use the Scrum Master or not, and leave that decision up to the team lead, including whether or not Kanban might be a better choice for that particular team.

I think you win.

I'm not anti-Scrum, I'm anti-people-doing-stupid-crap-and-saying-it's-Scrum. Sounds like you have a decent environment with people who sort of know what they're doing. Are you hiring?

It's a good place with people who are trying to keep improving. Not hiring atm though. New business is slow.

> is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira?

Yes, there are quite a few shops that use scrum without using Jira.

However, I'm not aware of a shop using Jira that isn't using scrum. This is useful to suss out job opportunities at companies who use scrum but don't want to advertise it. If they mention Jira, I know it's a scrum shop (important to me because I want to avoid scrum shops.)

Funny you mention that. I was going to say "oh no. you can do Kanban with Jira," but then I remembered that every place I've seen that "does Kanban" is really doing some local spiral-waterfall-esque process, but using the Kanban board on Jira. And even those are using Kanban without telling their management chain because their management chain would freak out because they can't spell Kanban and after going to "Scrum Camp for Managers," they at least know how to spell Scrmu. (very clearly this is not all managers. I've had the pleasure of working with several people who really know what they're doing. But I think it's all to often you find a stunned management chain who's trying to make sense of Scrum.)

I should have been clearer as to what my point was: Just 'cause you're using the tool (Jira) does not mean you're automagically using the process (Scrum).

And maybe a related side-point: Scrum (like Agile) is a way of thinking about software development. Not everyone gets that. That might be the value of a good Scrum-Master. I've yet to see a good Scrum-Master in the wild. Most of the ones I've encountered are just dudes who tweak Jira settings half the day and use the other half of the day poking at Jira's SQL schema so they can fix config errors they made before they learned how the current version of Jira works. Or... in other words... if you're only filling out Jira tickets and only doing the ceremonies, then you're leaving half of Scrum's value on the table. Too many people do this.

> Just 'cause you're using the tool (Jira) does not mean you're automagically using the process (Scrum).

Absolutely. No tool can successfully make the process. Its job is to make the process easier.

> That might be the value of a good Scrum-Master. I've yet to see a good Scrum-Master in the wild.

Let me share a secret. I'm a trained and certified Scrum Master. You're spot on about it being a way of approaching things more than anything else. Software development is in large part an exercise in complexity management, and the Agile approach is fundamentally a very useful way of conceptualizing how to manage complexity at a very high level of abstraction.

But as practiced, I've soured on it quite a lot. The ideal is... ahem... ideal, but what we tend to see is kind of a funhouse mirror version of it that, at best, isn't helping. Different flavors of Agile are better (Kanban) or worse (Scrum) about this, but it affects all to one degree or another.

> Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira

When I was at Amazon my team used Scrum but didn’t use Jira. I’d imagine the other FAANG companies don’t either

I was also at Amazon. We used a slightly modified version of scrum in that at least my team wasn't afraid to push back on ceremonies we didn't think we needed. Sprint planning? virtually always. Sometimes without the planning poker deck. Daily standups? virtually always. Retrospectives? not as often as you might think.

But... was decision making authority devolved to the team, SDM or TAM? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Our code was nothing but a series of queries to config settings and simple math. And even then it took weeks to get a decision on how things should work so we could tweak the config settings used in code that was now difficult to understand. Refactoring? pish! Unit tests? who wants to test every class? (i.e. - management didn't understand what unit tests or TDD were.)

My experience with Amazon was we toed the line for the easy bits of Scrum (ceremonies, etc) but the stuff that seems to matter where wildly different between teams.

If someone asked me "Does Amazon use Scrum?" I would say "in theory, but not really in practice."

In 2016 when we all moved to the new issue tracking system, I sort of wished we could use Jira. For most of that year my team put Todos and Issues in the GIT repo along with the code because we were tired of losing days of info in the system as they kept reverting to known good versions and losing issue tracking data (because the format of the data was dependent on new code that was just reverted.)

Though I do know that parts of amazon (AWS, Studios, etc.) were able to avoid the majority of the problems. I had hoped when Andy took over the whole shebang, things would get better. But after poking my head in last month, things as the bit-A seem to have gotten a bit worse: interns and SDE II's still do all the coding (one of the reasons i left; i'm not an intern and i like coding), but no-one on the team I was called in to help still hadn't read any of the TDD books and just assumed a unit test was a test you wrote to test a single class, because a class is a unit.

But let me stop bitching about a company I don't work at anymore and say I don't disagree with you but it brings up a point I should have mentioned: "Scrum" probably means different things in different teams. Big companies have a lot of teams that might all say they're doing "Scrum", but they're doing it in a very different way. Some will ignore the intangible aspects of Scrum and Agile, and only use the tools (like Jira). Others will be adamant that every ceremony must be performed at exactly the right time. Most will try to do the best they can even though product management has their heads so far up... hold on... i should be nice... i have worked with product managers that are excellent, i just wish there were more of them.

Yeah. Amazon is a big place with a lot of teams. They're probably all doing a version of scrum. And they're not using Jira. So we have an existence proof that it happens with at least big companies.

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