Why Scrum is Stressing You Out

[konfab]

SCRUM/Standup has always been misused at the companies I worked at. It's supposed to be
SM: Piet how did you go yesterday?
P: made progress on Ticket 1111, about 50% done now, nothing currently blocking me, should be done today and will kick off the next thing.
SM: Shap, Jannie you?
J: flipping thing is being a pig, the call to the API is still randomly timing out, I have a meeting with Sandra from the integration team at 10 to look at logs and see if we can diagnose the issue. Will update you via mail after that.
SM: Ok great, let me know if you need anything else.

What ends up happening, Piet is behind and instead of going "I'm battling" the stories and over explaining come out.
SM: Piet how did you go yesterday?
P: Ja it went ok, I was making decent progress until the solar flare that tripped the power and caused my mouse battery to explode and also my monitor to rotate 90 degrees to the right. I was digging in to the code and seeing if I could see why the thing isn't working properly, but the 90 degree rotation is making it tough.
K: Piet have you tried lying on your side? I once had a terrible beer pong incident where I sprained my left flaculate minor and I couldn't turn my head. It was on the team building trip in 2020 where we went to gatskopsondernskoen... Remember how wasted John from accounting got?! HAHAHAHA. Anyone?!
S: OH JEEPERS I REMEMBER THAT!!!! We had to carry John to his room and tie him to the bed because he kept wondering off, one time we found him in the fountain and the hotel threatened to toss us out... so rock n roll. Speaking of... anyone up for karaoke on Friday night?
A: I'm IN!

This is such a bad way of looking at work.

The right way is to look at it based on risk.

Every piece of work has two phases. First there’s an uphill phase where you figure out your approach. You have a basic idea about the task, but you haven’t figured out what the solution is going to look like or how to solve all the unknowns.

Eventually you reach a point where there aren’t any more unsolved problems. That’s like standing at the top of the hill. You can see clearly all the way down the other side. Then the downhill phase is just about execution.

 

[warrenpridgeon]

This is such a bad way of looking at work.

The right way is to look at it based on risk.

I think my example was too simplistic. It's often "hard" to describe how far up the figuring out part of the curve you are... which tends to lead to scenario 2 where developers feel they have to defend the "nothing to physically show yet"... a large part of developing is not the actual coding part... there's reading other code, figuring out a whole bunch of stuff... testing a whole bunch of stuff.

 

[NarrowBandFtw]

SCRUM/Standup has always been misused at the companies I worked at. It's supposed to be
SM: Piet how did you go yesterday?
P: made progress on Ticket 1111, about 50% done now, nothing currently blocking me, should be done today and will kick off the next thing.
SM: Shap, Jannie you?
J: flipping thing is being a pig, the call to the API is still randomly timing out, I have a meeting with Sandra from the integration team at 10 to look at logs and see if we can diagnose the issue. Will update you via mail after that.
SM: Ok great, let me know if you need anything else.

What ends up happening, Piet is behind and instead of going "I'm battling" the stories and over explaining come out.
SM: Piet how did you go yesterday?
P: Ja it went ok, I was making decent progress until the solar flare that tripped the power and caused my mouse battery to explode and also my monitor to rotate 90 degrees to the right. I was digging in to the code and seeing if I could see why the thing isn't working properly, but the 90 degree rotation is making it tough.
K: Piet have you tried lying on your side? I once had a terrible beer pong incident where I sprained my left flaculate minor and I couldn't turn my head. It was on the team building trip in 2020 where we went to gatskopsondernskoen... Remember how wasted John from accounting got?! HAHAHAHA. Anyone?!
S: OH JEEPERS I REMEMBER THAT!!!! We had to carry John to his room and tie him to the bed because he kept wondering off, one time we found him in the fountain and the hotel threatened to toss us out... so rock n roll. Speaking of... anyone up for karaoke on Friday night?
A: I'm IN!

plenty of SMs I've encountered were hiding behind the "team accountability" mantra all comfy and ignorant, that's been the downfall of it all

as mentioned previously in this thread many SMs have become, or got forced into signing a job spec that made them become, "delivery leads" ... i.e. project managers by a different name where the timeline becomes their accountability explicitly and is no longer a "team accountability"

funny how stand-ups and all other interactions transform when the "facilitator" knows their ass is first on the line, not "the team"