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Comment by pino999 | Hacker News Reader

Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.

Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.

Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.

That is a problem. For who is it created exactly?

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> the worthless points (why not a time unit)

The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)

Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.

Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.

I had to laugh about your comment, this is exactly how it goes. People are used thinking in time units.

Then you have modified fibonacci, which make me puke. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20. I get special headaches because of names like this.

However you can find this page if you adding them up by as strings, it isn't connected, but attack on titan was a good anime: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/123581320

Weird coincidence. I need to sleep, spend a lot today in my headspace.

Thinking about complexity as entropy, the friction, so they try to estimate "useless work" in their eyes. Heat transfer is velocity then. Firing up the next cycle. Detectable Delectable malicious, makes me hot really. Fiery.

It is just engine design really;) How bad can that be?

We don't even get real time, just pretend time. But I have to say, I admire this idea. All the time wasting around it, retro's with stupid humiliations. They run on naming and shaming. Sticks and carrots.

Works well :D Until people stop participating in the retro's. There is nothing to say, nobody says anything. They start atomizing the tasks infinitely or always inflate the estimate by 2. The standup nobody speaks, but they work like silent ghosts.

Scary sight huh? Happy Helloween vibes inglorious bastards.

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