Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
I just recently learned what "scrum manager" is and it sounds like a cult of useless middle managers.
I started at a new company and have been filling a scrum master role until they find me a replacement and I can move to the position I was supposed to be hired for and honestly, its the worst job I've ever had. Its literally hand holding and baby sitting. Its terrible. I almost got pushed in front of traffic when I asked "why cant the engineers move their own boards...?"
Your company and mine seem to be very different. We have agile coaches, but they mostly organise cooperation and shoulder check our stakeholders if they try to scope creep some bullshit in.
We also have agile coaches but the way my team uses jira is not at all how its supposed to be used. They are basically forcing it on us and people arent thrilled so the agile coaches are trying to mold it to what they want but they dont want it. Its a whole thing. Im also not a scrum master, Im an engineer pretending to be a scrum master as well as doing my other work and our agile coaches are...clueless for lack of a better word. Jira works great for our other teams. Just not the team Im on.
Yeah, that sucks. Let's hope for better times my friend
Hey thanks I appreciate it. Like I said, just waiting for them to find a real scrum master for my team then I get to do my actual job but at least its pushing me into more of a "people skill" position. Trying to silver lining it haha
The temporary construct is the most durable of them all 😔
checking in from the 45 minute "stand up" in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak. So we all know we're just working with the window as close to the camera as possible so it looks like we're listening
One of the teams in my pod are SO BUSY right now and I know they dont want to be in a meeting every day and no one talks and I have to roll through this daily script and I am met with deafening silence and its crushing. I want to tell my boss "dude this isnt benefitting anyone" but its what the company wants. And everyone suffers for it.
Scrum master = project manager.
Definitely not, Scrummasters should not be connected to the project at all. Their job goes directly against it, a PM is a stakeholder who will ask for everything to be done immediately, and needs to get stuff done. A Scrummaster should be neutral, and should uphold the process and defend the dev team.
Common scenario:
That right there highlights where a scrummaster should be working. Most companies do treat them as neutered dogs though, and don't give them the power. True scrummasters have the ability to push back on PMs and defend their teams, keeping developers out of it so they can stay heads down. (Less useless meetings)
A project manager should never be a stakeholder. A project manager should be managing expectations and pushing back against scope creep and ridiculous demands for immediate results as part of managing the project based on available resources and the estimates of the project team compared to overall progress. They will also address situations where different interacting parts need to be timed correctly, but that would also be the same responsibility of a scrum master, because they manage the project when using agile terms.
Most places treat project managers as neutered middle men who are implementing the will of the stakeholders, which is why so many end up being the terrible type that you are stereotyping project managers to be. Those same organizations will do the same thing to the scrum master or whatever name they give to the person who is supposed to be managing the project. You know, a project manager.
Probably right, in my experience you're describing a Product Owner, someone who is neutral on the business side who takes care of prioritization in a netural way vs a Project Manager, who does have requests, asks, and demands of the dev team
I earned certification in the early days. "Scrum Master" was supposed to be a team member who took on the role of interacting with external stakeholders, and help the team organize the work.
The scrum master protects the team from interruptions and un-scheduled work and facilitates planning meetings.
More recent iterations minimized the Scrum Master as a first class role. Scrum Manager sounds like a new role the process.
I did a search, came up with this gem.
All the other search results did not have "scrum manager", and the end of the video indicates this is not an official role in Scrum, but a term used for managers who are all in on the values of the scrum process.
Having worked in a lot of scrum teams in positions ranging from Jr Dev to CTO, I have become a huge proponent of scrum masters.
And in my experience a SM becomes a full time position at about 15 devs.
Exactly right, scrummasters should be outside of the business and developer chain so they can uphold the process first and foremost. One of the phrases I hate the most is "we're in crunch time, we don't have time for process." No, that's when you need process the most! It doesn't matter if it's crunch time or whatever, PMs and business sometimes needs a reality check on what is possible and what isn't, and developers need someone in their corner that isn't also their manager.
Wait, are you talking about a scrum master under a different name or an actual position above that?
depends how big the project is. large projects benefit from it being broken down into multiple smaller projects and communicated from week to week to coordinate. but smaller projects, it's just a giant waste of time.
I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it's comments.
We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don't, I don't think I've ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.
How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don't even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D
I've never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I'll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:
Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.
e.g. "The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows"
Quoting from some of the comments
Its literally hand holding and baby sitting.
That's about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.
checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak.
This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like "JoBob I'll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig" or "After standup I'd like to talk to the team about XYZ". We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says "I couldn't figure out how to schoop the woop, so I'm still working on that." but again our scrum master will say "Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don't we chat it out after stand up".
I hate that paragraph but I can't find a good place to break it up, sorry.
Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:
I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.
First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.
Second: There's such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it's a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to "type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit".
Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren't just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says "eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that", we just suck it up and do it.
This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it's crazy to me how ridiculous y'all make the process.
edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you'll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that's almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it's our own fault when it happens to us.
as a scrummaster who pleads incessently with management to let me actually run scrum correctly, this hits home, and it makes me sad. I could chat for hours with you about how stupid people ruin the Agile process
We had daily 45min+ stand-up at my old place, averaged 10 minutes per person. That team just reaaally loved meeting. Code was in de facto maintenance mode, even though there was years-long backlog and a shit tons of reasons to rework on the code base. It is like they hated coding, manager was old and he enforced coding standard like it was the early 00s, no OOP, no abstraction, bo new language features. Anyway, I disgress.
I raised the issue with the 15-25 hours of meeting per week and how little was being done, which I swear, they said was because we did not do enough "admin" and scrum work, and doubled down on the process. We were now expected to take 30min per day to write down how we spent our time to present to the team each retro.
Job was technically easy, because, well, we did very little technical stuff. I always had hated useless meetings, but I always managed to have some input on how to spend my time in othrr jobs. Someday I felt like crying in the morning before opening the mandatory webcam, thinking about the next hour of meeting, and I quit right then, I never joined another call and I kepty resignation to emails.
That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.
While true, that cuts both ways, a successful team is not successful because of 'scrum', it's successful because it finds a methodology that works for them, which can be in terms of scrum, but even if no one was chanting Agile buzzwords, that team would still self organize in a similar way, just without the precise buzzwords.
What's obnoxious is that a lot of folks, with a vested interest in, say, consulting, will give credit to "Agile" for teams succeeding and then simultaneously call all failures that ostensibly use Agile but fail "not true Agile". It can be harmless enough when self-organizing, but then it doesn't really matter if it is "big-A Agile" or not. People hung up on the "big-A Agile" may be expecting to cash in with consultancy money, or use it as a club to assert their authority by their self-proclaimed alignment to 'Agile'. They are advocating for Agile, therefore if you challenge anything about their direction, they will invoke the magic Agile word to silence criticism about their methods. Once an organization has "acheived Agile", ironically they frequently close the door on any consideration of methodology reform. "We are running Agile now, whatever you may think we are doing wrong the industry agrees with us because the industry uses Agile, so stop complaining".
So Agile may be technically workable, but the frustration is that it is vague enough to allow anyone to do almost anything and still 'fairly' claim Agile, but as a brand word it confers unreasonable authority for certain folks. As the most prominent brand word in the world of project management, it is further correlated with the 'default' asserted methodology of any crappy group looking toward consultancy/self-help to fix their bad team situation with a bandaid of methodology.
Really appreciate your based and realistic comment, thank you! Sound like a cool place to work at and shows, it can work out good.
I think the tool is very powerful and a benefit for all, but only when used right. Actually I find myself or at least my thoughts in almost all of your points about basic shit.
Edit: either I fckd up or the app but my reply about the cult thing was not meant to be a reply to your description and sharing
It IS a great place to work, and I absolutely hate that 20 years ago I post under this handle on stuff like "Ubersite" about how "We should stop saying 'sucks' for negative things. How do we expect to get blowjobs if we keep saying bad things 'suck dick'". Like I just can't tie that to my employer as much as I'd like to hype them up to dev/engineers online :p
I'm sure the internet super sleuths can figure it out, but I can't imagine why they would bother :p
You didn't mess it up, it wasn't posted as a reply to me, I just saw it in other parts of the comments :)
My intension was to make a harmless little fun about scrum masters who extensively use colors and communicate like they have a conversation with children.
Man if I had taken the fucking time to check which community this was post to, I could have saved myself a lot of typing since I wouldn't have bothered with the comment section :D Good post tho!
I like some of the concepts of agile and scrum. Two week sprints rather than multi-year projects. Faster turn around on bugs. Having a prioritized backlog so we know what we are doing next. Small standups to get ahead of blockers. Spending less time documenting everything and more time developing. You don't need a PM or scrum master in those things. A good team lead can do it. If the PM needs an update, they can look at the board.
A lot of the crap that gets add in to it is so freaking useless. There is an AVP at my company that keeps pushing everyone to sign and share team agreements so "there can accountability." It's so cringy. If someone is getting stuff done, do you really think having them sign something saying they will do it is going to help? If someone is getting stuff done, then it isn't going to change anything. It's infantalizing. So much of it is micromanagement and lack of team trust.
The last place i worked at they started pushing the same type of cringe. What made it worse was the PM/BA wasnt actually writing stories. One sprint I had 4 stories with just titles and "TBD" on the description. His boss was mad that my productivity was low when i couldnt do the work they couldn't describe.
Good job not doing a murder! I don't know if I could keep my cool at whomever allowed "TBD" to get into an active sprint.
How can you provide acceptable results if there is no acceptance criteria defined? Was "literally reads minds" on your job posting?!
The problem was that my boss was a title hopper and needed to fill his old position and he did it with yes men who wouldn't stand up for anything. Meant that these yes men were also not the greatest at doing the rest of the job either.
They were expecting me to just do Hero Engineering by not objecting, put in more time and fill on the gap when theu couldn't do their job. Was the first time in 20 years i ever was reprimanded, been praised at everything else I've done. So i knew at that point this was just a toxic place to work.
Sounds infuriating as hell. Props for your use of the past tense :D
Of course. Management has to be able to understand them 😉
As manager, I have to say that is uncalled for. As a developer, I will say you are 100% accurate.
See, that's the thing. You've also been in the dev role and not just a manager or only mostly a manager. Good manager have background in or at least understanding of the thing they're managing.
And this may answers the question, who thought that developers shouldn't talk about technical stuff in all of this process. Feels like enthusiasts meet up to talk about all but the common things.
Simplicity is literally part of the point? Who wants to look at a flow chart when it just needs to be a few lists of tasks? The general design is still heavily inspired by physical cards or sticky notes, but it's always been just a list of lists.
Funny how many people are joking around those weird activities for some of the meetings like stickers, 2 truths 1 lie, etc etc etc. And we still do it.
According cameras - it's easier, but in my team we never forced anyone.
I don't remember the source, could have been anything from Stand Up Comedy to someone I know IRL, but I feel like they really cracked the "2 truths 1 lie" code.
Yay, it's Story Time! There will be milk and cookies, right?
Right?
Down with sprints! Down with weekly retros! Down with scrum masters! Down with burn down charts! Just give me a feature to work on and a tool to track tickets. Everything else can fuck off.
Scrummaster here. Interesting enough, Agile was built to be completely developer driven, to reduce meetings and stress on developers and reduce waste time. Instead we have what I have coined "corporate agile". Agile has been bastardized and ruined by corporations to sneak in their bullshit.
For example, the most basic rule of Agile is that it should be Team driven. This means:
Instead I've seen
So, I'm very burnt out as a scrummaster. We get no power, and us who truly do believe in true agile are shot down continuously because people who don't understand developers or development want us to micromanage, and I hate micromanaging my teams. If they let me actually do my job I could get them all the data they need, but they think they know agile better than I do.
Thanks for letting me rant. I'm sorry Corporate Agile has failed you
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