[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for s... ___________________________________________________________________ Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery? what are the pros and cons of sprints and daily standups in your experience Coming from old school 'non-agile' financial world focused on bottom line I was in a bit of a shock learning about this daily standup ritual. Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress. Do these extra bureaucracy layers, meetings, checkmarks and vague "man-points" estimates actually bring any value. Author : andyxor Score : 63 points Date : 2021-03-04 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago) | domano wrote: | In my org dailies are mostly helpful and not a reporting tool. We | work in project teams for our customers and are about 300 people. | | Also our agile approaches mostly work out well, but our whole | organization is structured in a way that facilitates this. | | We have only 2 levels of hierarchy and crossfunctional groups for | arbitrary topics like "wage transparency", "consulting" or | "technology". Anyone interested can take part in those and they | get some budget too. | | Every few weeks there are townhalls where economic development is | reported by the executives to the rest of the company and anyone | can ask questions. Since covid we do this via google meet with | great success. | | All in all agile approaches only truly work if acceptance from | the higher ups is high. If agile is just used to get tighter | deadlines out of devs it is actively harmful. | corytheboyd wrote: | I'm a little less zealous in my dislike of it. It's not that the | process itself is "bad", the ideals behind it make sense. In | practice (my own experience) it easily degrades into what I call | "fake work"-- you feel like you're doing lots of productive | measurement and estimation by drawing nice little boxes around | projects, but projects rarely ever work this way. The one thing I | see constantly is moving on to the next project because we | checked off all the agile boxes, without giving much care to | maintenance. There is always maintenance work, and it's very easy | to turn a blind eye to. | | Something I consider maintenance work is refactoring of systems | as new projects are planned/implemented. Everyone knows it's a | bad idea to just bolt on more and more "feature" work without | thinking systemically, then we all point at "systemic" issues in | retrospective meetings. | | Again though, I'm not losing any sleep over this it's just an | observation from 9 years of experience as a web developer working | for mostly SV tech companies large and small. It won't be | everyone's experience, and in general the best advice I can give | is try to come up with solutions using your own experience and | opinions over those people implicitly/explicitly tell you to | follow because they are "good". | imbnwa wrote: | > Something I consider maintenance work is refactoring of | systems as new projects are planned/implemented. Everyone knows | it's a bad idea to just bolt on more and more "feature" work | without thinking systemically, then we all point at "systemic" | issues in retrospective meetings. | | When the great CPU architect Stephen Keller was on Lex | Fridman's podcast, he made a comment that architectures should | be refactored every 5 years and I thought to myself, "Good luck | with that in Enterprise" as I looked over at the 10+ year old | legacy infrastructure holding back org-level velocity at work | corytheboyd wrote: | oof every FIVE years is an eternity in software years. Maybe | I have been working alone for too long while between jobs, | but it just feels so much better to listen to all of your | hunches about it being refactor time than to ignore them for | the sake of functionality. It's just not possible to act on | the hunch later when you have lost that important deep | context and hastily added twelve other things too. | imbnwa wrote: | Tbf he was specifically thinking of CPU archs but at | "Enterprise Scale" might as well be talking 10 years. | Personally, from your comment, I'm learning to just stop | giving a fuck and apply the (obvious, cause, you know, | you've been looking at it for 5 years at least) re-factor | regardless | mytailorisrich wrote: | The daily stand-up is about communication and fostering quick | information sharing and quick problem resolution. | | That's also the reason they advocate that ideally the team should | sit all together. In that ideal work the daily stand-up lasts | only 5-10 minutes, it's not meant to be a dreaded status meeting | where you talk for 5 minutes then try not to fall sleep for an | hour... | kevin_nisbet wrote: | In my experience with old companies adopting agile, is I equate | it to a company wants to evolve it's culture, but in doing so | they start doing what they think the companies they want to | emulate do to succeed. I'd equate it to doing a cargo cult. | | Doesn't mean there isn't value to companies that have succeeded | with it, or created a value culture around this coordination. But | my experience was a bunch of people sitting around talking about | what color paper should be used for a particular work item on the | sticky board, which I struggle to see the value of. | g051051 wrote: | There are no "pros". Agile was created by consultants to sell | consulting, and the so-called "Agile Manifesto" is nothing but | silly aphorisms unrelated to the task of developing and | delivering software. | buster wrote: | Did you even care to check who wrote the agile manifesto? A | good book about that might be clean agile by uncle Bob. It | should will your view on the origin and history of agile. | unethical_ban wrote: | I like the idea of Kanban and 3x weekly standups/status. | | VS | | Sprints and daily standups. | | --- | | Daily standups are too often, not enough updates, and it feels | more like pressure than utility for the engineers. | | Sprints, while helping keep multiple teams working on a single | "epic" or "feature" in sync, also feel like an arbitrary slice of | time vs. letting people work on things at the pace they are | comfortable at. Finish early? Careful taking new work in, it will | look bad to bring new things into the sprint and not finish. | | Take an extra day on a story due to some complications? That's | fine if it's middle of sprint. But rollover into new sprint? Oh | gosh, what will that do to our sprint report? | | Time estimations, maintaining backlogs of work and prioritizing, | and documenting work done are all great. But some of it has too | much ritual to it. | natoliniak wrote: | > Careful taking new work in, it will look bad to bring new | things into the sprint and not finish | | yep. Furthermore, there are many other perverse incentives that | I noticed, but one stands out: the incentive not to take on | risky or difficult stories out of fear that if it is not | finished by the "committed" date (end of sprint), you will be | tarred and shamed during the sprint review. | nihil75 wrote: | Yes, it's working for us, but not without cost. | | It's a good way to set expectations for what will be/is to be | delivered in a Sprint, and limits going off-piste in too many | directions while not delivering functionality (which is a problem | for creative/broad-skillset developers at times). | | It also limits the impact/waste in case the requirements change - | you only worked two weeks in the wrong direction. (and they say | changing requirements is the biggest problem in software projects | since ever) | | However, I find that it often reduces developers to mindless | drones, just trying to satisfy acceptance criteria without | thinking about the big picture. (You know you're there when | Refinement meetings are very quiet and the Architect does most of | the talking). | | As for estimation/scoring - I find that estimating "complexity" | is nonsense. Treating points as "days" is more realistic and | leads to better time management from everyone. | nihil75 wrote: | Oh and standups are not that bad! | | We keep it small, team level (6 people), and they last 15 | minutes. | | No pressure to describe anything - you can say "I'm still | working on that thing" and that's that.. | | Honestly it's more of a social thing, especially while | remoting, and a chance to share thoughts and offer assistane. | danielovichdk wrote: | Sounds like you are not doing scrum. And I only know of the term | 'daily' being prt of the scrum process. | | So. If you're not doing scrum you are not leveraging it's | potential and even more important, its rules. | | The rules of a daily is non-disputable. It has a formula. If | you're not following the formula, it's not scrum. | | A daily is not about progress. It's about communication. You | communicate what you did since the last daily, and what you | expect to do before the next. | | But you're not being measured on what you communicated. You are | merely sharing what you' re doing. | | If there is discussion in a daily, it's not a daily. If you're | not using a board for the baseline for communicating, you're | fucked. | | The role of a scrum master is to take note of what is going on | and help out if she hears anything that sounds off. A good scrum | master is a bit like a dictator. Focused, on top of things, | helpful and listens to what is going on and does not bend to | outsiders. | | Good scrum masters are hard to come by. That's most often imo, | why scrum had a bad rep in some places. | | Also remember, agile is something that must happen on a top | level, otherwise it will not work very well. | logicslave wrote: | "But you're not being measured on what you communicated. You | are merely sharing what you' re doing." | | This is never true. Its a daily confession of what you did. Its | micromanagement. | rukuu001 wrote: | A good team will produce good software, regardless of | methodology. | | But a good agile team will be more responsive to changing | customer needs. | brailsafe wrote: | Every company fails in some respect with at least rate limiting. | The last thing you should do in software dev is introduce more | meetings, but that's how managers interpret agile. If I didn't | get anything done, or only a trivial part of a bigger picture, | the last hing I want to talk about or hear from anyone else for | 30 minutes first thing in the morning is that. Likewise with only | being able to the fastest things done in two weeks, or small | parts of them if the sprint schedule isn't adapted to the team | very well. | | In most circumstances, one or two updates a week would be fine, | preferably followed by the rest of update meetings so more | contiguous hours of problem solving can happen. | geocar wrote: | Yes. They make it easier to co-manage larger teams with people | with drastically different philosophical opinions and can (if | well-trained and practiced) help avoid burning out your team. | | That is to say, in a lot of ways a small clever theologically- | aligned team is going to be better. But if there's a good reason | you can't have that, scrum can help you make the most of it. | throwaway889900 wrote: | The incentives have changed. Now I just work to say something at | the standup, and standups are like 30 minutes long because people | keep turning it into classical waterfall style discussion | meetings between two people while everyone else listens. I hate | it and the fossils that perpetuate this. | comprev wrote: | It's all about cutting the time in standups down to a bare | minimum. I don't care what you did yesterday, I want to know in | one sentence what you're doing _today_ and if you're blocking | anyone. | dec0dedab0de wrote: | Sprints are nonsense unless they have gaps bewtween them, noone | can sprint indefinitely | | Standups are good for small teams all working on the same thing, | and only if no managers are present. Unless the manager is | writing code too . | | Kanban seems ok but i havent used it for any period of time. | | The various tools are nice for remembering what needs to be done | and making shared checklists. | imbnwa wrote: | > Sprints are nonsense unless they have gaps bewtween them, | noone can sprint indefinitely | | This is the crux of the nonsense. A high-level engineer can | work around this but for the mass of ticket punchers, it just | encourages non-thinking, risk aversion, and a lack of trust | between themselves do the pressure of velocity charts, which | translates into buggy code, mounting legacy blockers. | | I know frontend engineers who didn't know what a finite state | machine was, nevermind how it was implicit in their business | code. For the mass of mediocre engineeers, sprints kill | incentive to learn and become a better engineer; no is | rewarding you. | | Product doesn't care cause they're incentive structure is | advesarial to Engineering push-back on tech debt, refactoring, | etc. Sprints allow them to make sure their bonus is on time. | Then Product people quit when BS mounts, another round of | Product management shows up, and rinse, repeat. | | I've seen this cycle happen three times in one org in just 5 | years, the org where I started as a Junior. | | And don't let DevOps also be working against sprints in a | mediocre org | | Sprints have, for most of the industry, not the Top 10% | employers and what not, frankly regressed the industry. | | Everyone stops working for the organization and starts trying | to figure out how to make the organization work for them, from | engineering to product to devops, etc. Good hiring is also a | factor in what you'll get out of your employers, but sprints | don't get you more at either rate. | mytailorisrich wrote: | 'Sprint' does not mean you have to push yourself to code as | fast as you can, nor does it mean that you have to start coding | straight away. In fact part of the work may not involve coding | at all (e.g. studies and architecture work) and these | activities can also be part of a sprint. | | Sprints are just time-bounded units to plan and execute the | work with the stated aim of having working software at the end | of each sprint. You can do that indefinitely in the same way | you can follow another software development methodology | indefinitely. | booleandilemma wrote: | In my experience sprints just represent artificial constructs | that in the long run serve no real purpose. We end up saying | strange things like "I won't be finished with X until next | sprint", or "we took in 15 points this sprint". I've seen | people become more interested in Jira ticket engineering than | the actual work. | Jtsummers wrote: | > 'Sprint' does not mean you have to push yourself to code as | fast as you can, nor does it mean that you have to start | coding straight away. In fact part of the work may not | involve coding at all (e.g. studies and architecture work) | and these activities can also be part of a sprint. | | I agree with this statement. However, I believe the term is | poorly chosen and, in my experience with managers, frequently | misunderstood. | | There are two issues I have with the term. First, sprints, as | a physical activity, are about short, very hard, bursts of | work which are fundamentally unsustainable. Even an athlete | competing in sprints takes a good break between each one. | Second, "sprint" conveys a sense that the focus _is_ on speed | because that 's how we judge sprinters. | | The first point suggests that Scrum needs a different kind of | interval than just a sprint. It needs something like a rest | period. Not a "sit down and do nothing" period, but analogous | to the "active recovery" that athletes often take part in | between exertions. Something productive, supportive, but | secondary to the principle objective (a runner isn't at the | race to stretch, but they stretch so they can continue to | race). | | That second point is important, managers hear sprint and they | think speed. Any kind of slow down or delay makes them think | that the team is just dicking around. The idea that a sprint | could be spent on anything bringing indirect value (rather | than direct) like test and deployment automation, refactoring | and cleanup, or training is antithetical to this perception. | Consequently you cannot, easily, put those activities into | sprints, or you have to disguise them or mete them out over a | series of sprints so that enough "real" value is being | created from the management perspective. | | Finally, "agile" is about responsiveness. The term was chosen | for the manifesto deliberately. We don't look at Usain Bolt | on race day and say, "Wow, that man is agile". But you | _would_ talk about the agility of a football player who | _loses speed_ dodging, avoiding, and leaping around a field | to get a 100 yard touchdown. The agile player is _responsive | to opposition and present conditions_. They do need to be | fast, but their ultimate speed isn 't just from raw speed but | from their ability to maintain progress despite adverse | conditions. A faster but less agile player could get lucky, | but more often will get blocked. The use of the term "sprint" | in Scrum conveys no real sense that adaptation and | responsiveness are important. | st3fan wrote: | Scrum is not agile. You really should not write scrum/agile. That | is just as bad c/c++ :-) | geocrasher wrote: | In a perfect world? Yes. On paper it is very good. And making | people accountable for their work is a good thing. So is | organizing work to be sure it gets done. I'm not a developer, but | my department is developing a product for internal consumption, | and using the Agile method is good for this purpose. I'm a | terribly disorganized person so I like the structure it brings. | | Beyond that, it's just a way of doing things, much like an OS. It | doesn't matter if you're running W10, MacOS, or some flavor of | Linux. If it's the right tool for the job, then it's the right | tool for the job. But if it's not, then why is it in use? | jayturley wrote: | From my experience as a scrum master, if there is any micro- | managing going on, it's being done wrong. The standup should | literally be no more than a minute per person. Each person gets | 2-3 sentences: "I did this yesterday. Today I'm working on this. | I could use some help with X. (if applicable)" | | It's meant to help keep the team aligned on what everyone is | doing at a higher level, not for any details at all. After the | standup, the team can address any requests for help that came up | as needed. But that falls outside of the standup. | | Agile is meant to help empower teams and improve their velocity, | and that requires people to own their own stuff. So the standup | should be a purely informative, high-level overview of where the | team is so everyone is aligned. If it's anything more, it will | become a cumbersome, painful exercise in micro-management and | tangential discussions. | UK-Al05 wrote: | Compared to what? My experiance of traditional project managment | is we used to have milestones, write daily progress reports, | requirement anaysis meetings with BA's etc | | In my mind scrum has less bureaucracy than that. | | Scrum Meetings are best used as a way to come together as a team | to work how to make progress today. | | For example: | | I want to deploy this change to prod today, but one of the tests | is failing and I don't know why. Ok lets get a couple of people | to mob on the test to figure out whats going on after scrum etc | | That's a good scrum meeting. | | Bad scrum meeting. Person 1: I did x yesterday. Person 2: I did x | yesterday etc Person 3: I tried to get x done yesterday, but I | got stuck i'll try again today. | | No value whatsoever. | | The emphasis should be on problem solving as a team, and focusing | the team on pain points to get work across the finish line. | | To that end i find "walking the board" far more valuable, than | status updates from each memeber. | cashewchoo wrote: | I've never felt like a stand-up with your manager-type-person | present is ever net helpful. Stand-ups just implicitly become | "what did you do yesterday that justified 10% of your biweekly | paycheck" at some level, and people end up talking to the manager | rather than to each other. | | I'm sure some super special orgs out there can counteract this | with their incredible non-toxic culture and such. Most cannot. | Ones that explicitly think they can almost certainly actually | cannot. | | If it's solely the IC's, I think that's where it _can_ be good. | People feel a lot more free to not say anything if they don 't | have any blockers and don't need to put anything to the team. | It's much easier to get in-and-out and have a high-bandwidth | discussion. | | I've felt the most comfortable where we sat down once a week for | an hour, went over the last week, and thought about the next. And | we had an open-door policy (not literally/physically of course) | if you ever needed to discuss blockers or put things to the team. | "Standups" happened naturally, about once or twice as week, where | people would accrete into a standup in the middle of our pod | discussing something that was so interesting/relevant that it | naturally drew us out of our offices. | | Maybe that was just the only time where we finally had the team | and the process mesh on a natural level, and it doesn't prescribe | this as "the way to do it" for anyone else. But damn did it work | for us, for at least two years, before the org changed enough | that our team didn't really exist as the same team anymore. | | One thing I have _never_ enjoyed was the "the big boss wants | this project done ASAP, have standups every day to make sure it | gets done as fast as possible". That and everything related to it | was awful. | 908B64B197 wrote: | Agile/Scrum is great if done properly. | | Most of the industry is doing it wrong/cargo-culting the wrong | think. Non-technical managers, or worse, CS grads whose goal | was to stop coding 4 years into their careers, took the parts | of Agile they liked and made it into a micro-management | strategy to justify their work. | | Agile was written at a resort by 10x engineers for 10x | engineers. Flat organization and high ownership (meaning these | guys have a stake in the company). Trying to blindly copy it to | highly hierarchical cost-center software shops is a recipe for | disaster where the only ones making money are the agile | consultants. | myth2018 wrote: | > Agile/Scrum is great if done properly. | | and, I'd like to point out, Agile/Scrum is great IF applied | on suitable organizations/projects. | | Some projects are too big by nature and, regardless of how | much resources are available, there are not enough 10x | engineers to be hired and trained to deliver the project | within a feasible time. | | Some organizations are too hierarchical and there's no way to | change entire cultures based solely on software projects' | needs. By extension, its employees are unlikely to show the | level of ownership required by Agile. | | Don't get me wrong, I like Agile and favor it over other | method families whenever I can, but I have a different point | of view when it comes to organizations "not well-suited to | Agile". I don't necessarily see them as limited solely based | on how well software projects can be carried within their | structures. | | It's indeed advantageous to possess a software project- | friendly environment. That would provide them a good edge | over competition. | | But there are so many other things beyond that, and so many | organizations being successful on their main goals despite | being Agile-hostile, that I'm more inclined to look for ways | to cope with their shortcomings. | | I'm not implying you wanted to say that, but I see many Agile | enthusiasts classifying those organizations as "not prepared | to Agile" and I think this is so wrong. I see that simply as | a natural incompatibility and, if I had to elect a culprit | (which I don't think to be the case), then Agile would be the | party which is in debt. | 908B64B197 wrote: | > Some organizations are too hierarchical and there's no | way to change entire cultures based solely on software | projects' needs. By extension, its employees are unlikely | to show the level of ownership required by Agile. | | These two issues can be solved by isolating the software | folks from the rest of the organization. Think of a company | within a company. That and fixing the hiring pipeline can | fix ownership: bringing a culture of stock based | compensation typically attracts high achievers and make it | important for the engineers to truly own the product. | hrktb wrote: | > Agile was written at a resort by 10x engineers for 10x | engineers. | | Do these 10x engineers need Scrum ? I don't think flat/high | ownership organization have a strong need to be told how to | do things, or import some cookie cutter framework in their | day to day operation. | | Getting inspired ? sure, but a lot of the ceremony parts of | Scrum don't make sense if people already communicate fluently | and organize seemlessly. | 908B64B197 wrote: | Nobody does the full Scrum. | | It's more of a set of ideas that can can be applied to a | project (or not) and ways of thinking about the software | engineering process itself. It's not a magic recipe, just | like no programming language or framework will make | RandomCo. a unicorn. | Jtsummers wrote: | One of the details of the manifesto is that it does _not_ | tell you how to do things, and in fact discourages the | prioritization of "processes and tools" over "individuals | and interactions" (doesn't remove processes and tools, but | it deprioritizes them). The manifesto was as much for the | developers as for their managers and customers. It | established the priorities of their work and relationship | with each other. | path411 wrote: | Honestly I feel like a team that communicates healthily in | channels on slack kinda defeats the entire purpose of stand | ups. At my current job, we even have the customers for my team | in slack channels and they are highly communicative, so | honestly it makes the whole scrum model seem just a waste of | time when I can start a question/thread right in slack with the | product owners/customers | matwood wrote: | A good team can make any process work, just like a bad | manager/team can destroy the best process. | | I've done daily stand-ups/check-ins either end of day or first | thing in the morning for nearly my entire career. I've also | been fortunate enough to have good team members and technical | management (prior to being management). | | I have always found them helpful, particularly when people get | stuck. Of course someone can always shout I'm stuck and hope | the right person hears, but I've lost count of the times | someone in the standup that likely would not have seen this | person's problem says 'oh, I've seen that - do this'. And that | includes possible management. Also, many people don't want to | say they are stuck or don't know something. While not | automatic, this does provide a scheduled block of time to speak | up. | | I've worked with many great engineer people who had tendencies | to go down rabbit holes. A daily check-in made micromanagement | unnecessary because it forced someone to think about what they | accomplished and where was it headed. | | Finally, it's ok to say nothing was accomplished yesterday. | Shit happens, we all know it. | angarg12 wrote: | What we think shouldn't matter, instead we should look at the | evidence to judge if Agile is beneficial for software delivery. | | The problem is that research into software engineering sucks. The | silver lining is that some people have done small scale studies | on this subject. | | The studies I've read range from no impact to a significant | improvement of using Agile methodologies over, say, waterfall | processes. This large variability is a hint of how inconsistent | these studies are, but I've seen more evidence piling up in the | "good" side of the scale. | | However, from your loaded comment seems clear you aren't really | interested in data anyway. | tester756 wrote: | I see value of daily standups and planning next sprint e.g 2 | weeks and I like them | | but we dropped that bullshit like "story points" - you know, | abstraction over abstraction of time/effort whatever it is. | | we estimate stuff in man hours. | l0b0 wrote: | > Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more | about signalling progress vs. actually making progress. | | There are two massive red flags in that sentence. If the standup | is being used as an excuse to micromanage something has gone | horribly wrong. And if people don't use it to make progress (that | is, asking for help and mentioning blockers) something else has | gone terribly wrong. | | There are about a million discussions about how broken Agile is, | most of which discuss some abomination of a process with very | superficial similarities to Agile. It's not like _having a | standup_ is some sort of magically good thing on its own if | people just use it to do things the way they 've always done | them. | | Cue the inevitable "If everybody is doing Agile wrong, maybe | there's something wrong with Agile?" response, to which I would | simply say that I've seen Agile work in at least two completely | different workplaces, and I've seen how terrible non-Agile | processes are in at least another two. | buster wrote: | Well, there is no mention of estimates in the manifesto. It's | just people want to know if the thing they buy might cost them | one million dollars or 100000 dollars. So giving estimates has | nothing to do with agile per se. You probably needed to tell your | customer or your boss how much time/money you think something | will cost before, didn't you? If you didn't, I don't see why you | should now. | | Daily meetings are not to micromanage and show off that you've | done so much work yesterday, but to identify issues that need to | be resolved and a good place to ask the team for help if you're | stuck. | | Unfortunately, agile nowadays is mostly scrum, following some non | sensical plan taught by some agile coach and too much management, | whereas agile was invented solely by and for developers (not | managers). | bern4444 wrote: | I hate the term sprints. The idea is good but the term is | horribly inaccurate. Sprint makes it seem like its a quick dash | to the finish line and then its over. But the work is never over. | One sprint ends and the next one starts immediately after. Work | is not a sprint, its a marathon. | | Sprints conceptually make sense. We have 3 features we want to | develop. Lets aim to complete them in the next 2-3 weeks. I like | them so long as the goals are extremly well defined and managed. | Too many teams though forget the agile aspect of agile | development. If there's a change to the priorities, its often | poorly communicated or just added to the sprint without removing | anything. | | Daily Standups, as practiced by most teams, are a waste of time. | They become status updates for the Project Manager or Team | Leader. | | What would be better is for engineers to use the time to review | ideas, issues that have cropped up and ask questions about the | codebase or specific issues. This is probably what a standup is | supposed to be but when its mixed in with the context of status | updates, it always takes a back seat. | | Pointing is a complete waste of time. I have no idea how long a | ticket is going to take until I start working on it. Estimations | are usually wrong anyway. If anything, tickets should be pointed | once the work is complete to track a teams acutal performance and | velocity (output). | | Having the team review tickets for the next sprint (sprint | planning) is useful for inital discovery (so long as it doesn't | involve pointing). One person on your team might know how to | solve a bug ticket or know if a feature ticket is deceptively | difficult. That discovery process can be extremely valuable. | | Overall agile ideas I think do help more than they hurt but not | always and not by much. | matt_s wrote: | Following any process to the letter by some text book is | problematic. | | If you consider things in the Agile Manifesto and the spirit of | being agile, the pros are things like you don't waste time | building stuff nobody uses. Why gather requirements, design, | develop, test, deploy of features that have minimal or no usage. | I've seen many cases that by the time a feature gets out there, | its not needed/wanted any more. There are charts and stuff on | this regarding Lean Software Development. Another pro is barriers | are identified quickly and can be problem-solved quickly. Figure | out your unknowns really early and you can adjust what you're | building. | | Over the last year with everything going on there were days where | at standup people said "got distracted" and that is perfectly | fine. I took that to mean they didn't get anything done during | the last day. There were some major life distractions this past | year. Those meetings aren't for management to keep tallies on | people for some fictitious scoreboard, they are there for the | team to identify barriers, ask questions, etc. so the work can | get done. Agile comes from lean principles from manufacturing, | its about eliminating wasteful steps in a process. | | Some cons would be with the wrong culture you get micro-managers, | people measuring stuff that doesn't matter (ticket size, | velocity, whatever) and possibly people gaming whatever nonsense | you are measuring. If there is bad culture the project management | process being used doesn't matter really, its not going to be | pleasant working in that. | | If there is high risk in what you are delivering, like if you're | building software for controlling a nuclear power plant, ICU | medical devices, etc. you may need a lot tighter controls around | the project process because software bugs can result in really | bad things. Maybe a waterfall process works better in those | situations, otherwise use agile that fits the people and | organization. | meheleventyone wrote: | Agile the stuff in the manifesto is pretty much spot on. | | Agile the stuff people make you do in work is often pretty anti- | thetical. | | Scrum as a process is basically poison. | jamesrr39 wrote: | Upvoted (although I'm not sure I agree with the last point, but | the top 2 are definitely spot-on) | | The agile manifesto is tiny and a scrum guide like this one: | https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html is readable in a | couple of hours. But the version of "scrum" forced on many | people is a far cry from that. | meheleventyone wrote: | For the last one, basically if a process is essentially never | implemented in a way that respects the principles it's | designed around something is very wrong. | jamesrr39 wrote: | Yes, I agree. But I'm not sure what you do about that | though. Stronger "dictacts" from an international "scrum | committee" putting out material telling you what is | "correct" scrum and what is not? | meheleventyone wrote: | The problem as ever is people and expecting that process | will fix them. Individuals and interactions over | processes and tools. | | A dysfunctional team won't be fixed by a new process to | follow. It'll just warp to the dysfunctions. | Jtsummers wrote: | Emphasize the principles more. | | The one thing I've consistently seen absent in many Scrum | attempts is the sprint retrospective. When this is | included and is permitted to include not just | code/product issues but also _process_ issues, it has | worked very well even when they skimped out on other | elements of Scrum. But most often the retrospective is | absent or the process is not permitted to be included in | it. This makes you fundamentally anti-Agile as you | literally have a rigid, static process. | | The one consistent element that I have found across | nearly every reading of Agile I've done and my | experiences over the past (now almost 20 professional) | years has been that the critical element of agile is its | responsiveness and introspectiveness. Lacking those two | things you do not have anything that can be called Agile, | at best it's an imitation, at worst it's SAFe and you | should run fast. | | DevOps, Lean, Scrum, Theory of Constraints (realized in | software, at least in part, as DevOps) to the extent that | they have defined processes they are not the same. But | the consistent element is introspection and | responsiveness leading to adaptation to the team, | organization, customers, and systems being | developed/maintained. | | This is the critical element missing from many | organizations and teams at the time of the manifesto. See | Waterfall, any CMMI office. They become static, they | delay their feedback loops to extraordinary time frames. | Waterfall (may it die a fiery death), in some spectacular | failures I've witnessed, had 5 years from start to | delivery for customer _test_ , not deployment. CMMI has a | strong association with Waterfall (unjust in my opinion), | but it still promotes a _static_ process that is only | reviewed when it 's time for your next appraisal | (technically it promotes continuous monitoring and | improvement, but like with Scrum everyone ignores it). | | It's still a crucial element missing from many | organizations who have cargo culted their way into Agile | or adopted "Agile" processes (like SAFe, may it suffer | the same fate as Waterfall). If your processors ever | become truly static, you either found The One True | Process (for your team and situation) or you're failing | to recognize and adapt to your circumstances. | frugalmail wrote: | Scrum, and "certified" (or not) Product Owners, Project Managers, | Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Technical leads, architects, | engineering managers, and QA that don't come with years of code | slinging under their belt have no place in software development. | | Kanban makes so much more sense when that kind of garbage is in | your work environment. | j4yav wrote: | I was a big believer 15 years ago, then became heavily | disillusioned, and now have a pretty pragmatic view of it. It can | help, if you don't know what you're doing at all it's a good | framework to start. I feel like the Kanban approach where the | team takes ownership of their process is a good one. There's a | lot of great stuff in there about communicating as a team, and | thinking about the customer. | | Too often though in practice it devolves into a kind of cargo | cult and the apologists lean way too hard into the "if it isn't | working, you must not have believed in it hard enough" defense | which is a bit too easy in my opinion. It short circuits any | actual reflection and learning. | | Basically, the agile manifesto is great.. the stuff agile coaches | try to sell you is hot garbage. Everything else is somewhere in | the middle, but Kanban is the closest because it preserves the | "we are uncovering" part of the manifesto. | smoldesu wrote: | no | nihil75 wrote: | Now I want to be devils advocate and give you the "corporate" | perspective - | | You say Agile disrupts your "flow", makes you deliver buggy code | and just work to close tickets like a drone? | | Good! Who said code needs to be perfect and bug-free? remember | Lean? Just get it out there! we can always fix things later. | | From a business perspective - we are spending money to develop | functionality, not our peoples skills. Tickets and tasks should | result in adding value _to the business_ , not to our codebase. | | This is a cruel and unsustainable way of thinking, which will | have your best developers leaving the company very quickly. But | if you're an enterprise corp - you see them as interchangable | "resources" anyway, and Agile helps you accomodate to them | leaving by splitting the work to small bits and having no single | owner. | | This is also a way of looking at things... | k__ wrote: | Depends what you build. | | For experimental stuff, agile could be good. | | For product stuff, Scrum could be good. | | For commodity stuff, six sigma could be good. | | Using one of these for something it isn't meant to do will lead | to failure. | furstenheim wrote: | I find value in part of it. Dailies I find very beneficial. You | get to hear what other people are having problems with, and maybe | you already faced something similar. Or the other way around, | when you face it you remember that someone solved a similar | issue. | patmcc wrote: | If "Agile" results in _extra_ layers of bureaucracy and more | meetings, that 's a great sign that agile is being done terribly | wrong. Which, to be fair, is very very common. | | Remember the manifesto: | | We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it | and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to | value: | | Individuals and interactions over processes and tools | | Working software over comprehensive documentation | | Customer collaboration over contract negotiation | | Responding to change over following a plan | hinkley wrote: | I think when Agile is finally replaced by something else it | will be because of: Individuals and | interactions over processes and tools Working software | over comprehensive documentation | | Nothing in Agile has actually overcome the problems of | horizontally scaling a team, and things like this stand in the | way of scaling one vertically. | | Scaling developers vertically requires having support tools, | processes, and people to get past the things that trip them up | and back to forward progress. They don't have to be big tools, | or big processes. In fact it's much more important that they be | reliable than that they have huge feature sets. | | But Agile without tools and processes? Show me anyone who is | pulling that off, and I'll show you someone who has mislabeled | a bunch of things as 'not-tool' and 'not-process'. | ipnon wrote: | My thought to every line quoted is "why?" What are the actual | principles involved, and why don't we just jump straight to | those when making process decisions? Manifestos do more harm | then good because their vagueness enables reinterpretation. | patmcc wrote: | https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html | [deleted] | unethical_ban wrote: | A manifesto _is_ a set of principles. Principles tend to be | vague. | myth2018 wrote: | > Manifestos do more harm then good because their vagueness | enables reinterpretation. | | That totally relates to my experience. | | I've seen this scene repeated over and over: | | - project begins | | - something happens and delays the project (arrival of new | team members who need some time to learn about the code base, | for instance; it's not even an issue, it's just a natural | consequence which makes the project go different than planned | and put certain kinds of managers in distress) | | - project start to get behind of the schedule or whatever | tool in use to track progress | | - "you are not a true Agilist" | | I just can't understand why is it so easy to blame the old | methods while it's so hard to identify weaknesses in the | current ones. | | Besides, the room they left for interpretation leads to a | good amount of bike-shedding and witch hunting as soon as | something goes wrong in the project -- if one assumes the | method is perfect, the only possible explanation for a | failure is that the method has been misfollowed. | closeparen wrote: | Considering that "old-school non-agile" can mean many different | things, it would be very surprising if Scrum were uniformly | better or worse than _all_ of them. | blablabla123 wrote: | Pros: if done properly it makes software delivery actually | predictable | | Cons: everything else :-) | | I enjoy the non-scrum world, but every time I try it, I realize | how bad it actually is for everyone involved, especially if there | are timelines. But also I think unless you're sufficiently | experienced, Scrum is micromanagement hell indeed. | kissgyorgy wrote: | A lot of people misunderstand it, but what agile says is | basically that "you should talk to each other more often" and | "you should make smaller steps". So it's a YES from me. | | If you never seen this, you should read this ASAP: | https://agilemanifesto.org/ | | Because that's all there is to know about Agile. Obviously it | takes a bit more time to really grasp how can you translate that | to lines of code or building a deployment pipeline or shipping | features, but if you understand these couple of lines, you | already know enough about agile development. | laurent92 wrote: | I think Agile is best learnt by first failing a 1-million | dollars Waterfall project. | | "Kids today don't know" what it feels like, explaining lawyers | how you didn't feel the wind turning after spending 9 months | delivering layer 1 and 2 and crossing your fingers that layer 3 | will be a wrap-up. Once you have seen that, the "less | paperwork, more interactions", the "add value not layers" | become a relief ;) | djcjr wrote: | The opponent is software complexity. The task is iterate design, | to create a simple solution. Money will be made or lost depending | on whether the solution is both simple and useful enough. | | Scrum, management, meetings distract at best, crush at worst, | this critical creative process. | mattzito wrote: | I've always been a fan of a light agile process - every few weeks | you sit down and come up with a target for the subsequent | interval - 2 weeks is a good start, shouldn't be more than 6-8 | weeks. Within that, you define what you want to work on - could | be a particular milestone within the project. Could also be user | stories, doesn't really matter as long as everyone has a good | sense of what the next milestone is. | | Then you check in as a group on a weekly, or maybe twice-weekly | basis, with an explicit goal of identifying risks and | uncertainties that have arisen during that timeframe. | | The goal here is not to micromanage, but to give a sense of | progress towards a goal - whether a metric shift, a release, a | roadmap commitment, etc. If you don't hit your interval | milestones a few intervals in a row, your high-level thinking | about timing is wrong, and you need to adapt the project or the | timing. | tanseydavid wrote: | The definition is just too loose and what we seem to wind up with | in many cases is a Cargo Cult version of Agile/Scrum. | | As an example, I have never had a PM/Team practice Agile/Scrum in | a manner where the total amount of Work-in-Progress is something | that gets paid attention to. | | In my opinion this is a very serious error. | jimmyvalmer wrote: | Speaking as someone from the financial world who was shocked to | learn about daily standups, no, agile is complete * invented and | promoted by non-technical armchair lieutenants. | | Mba-speak, translated: | | Value prop = You don't really need this | | Data Science = Not a Real Science | | I have it more or less working = It's not working | | I got it working = Please don't ask me about this anymore | | Does this make sense? = Are you even listening? | | Let's stop talking about talking about the issue = We're halfway | through this meeting | | Please enter a jira estimate = I am or want to be your boss | | Quick stand-up = I'm interrupting your flow | | Daily stand-up = I'm interrupting your flow every day | | PM = Tom Smykowski | | Product = Paid Intern | | Feature complete = See "I have it more or less working" | | Deep dive = I have no intention of pursuing this | | In-flight = I enjoy dramatizing the trivial (See "How Can We Land | the Plane") | | This is not intended to offend anyone = This probably offends | everyone | mathgladiator wrote: | Let's take this offline = Well... It's complicated | pan69 wrote: | Time-box it = Same amount of work in less time | iab wrote: | More-or-less working, emphasis on "less" | master_yoda_1 wrote: | I am not even understand the purpose of manager in the team. | steerpike wrote: | Agile is the worst possible way to deliver software except for | everything else we've tried. | lawwantsin17 wrote: | The surface area of a project is a fractal. Don't rathole. | Writing tickets is the problem. Stand ups are so the mngr has | something to say to his boss at his stand up. | droobles wrote: | no | | too much chin wagging, not enough building too much synchronous | communication | | for being called agile you don't build software very quickly with | it | superbcarrot wrote: | The topic is kind of broad but to focus on standups, I have a | couple of firm beliefs: | | - Standups don't need to be daily - it's too much. Twice a week | is okay (this can be adjusted depending on team/product | dynamics). | | - They shouldn't consist of everyone telling everyone else what | they're working on. This practice is boring and useless to anyone | who is present. (If you want to check what I'm working on, log | into the issue tracking system and look at the tickets against my | name.) Instead, standups should focus on pieces of work that need | to be delivered or that need to change status. | rkv wrote: | > They shouldn't consist of everyone telling everyone else what | they're working on. | | It's a common habit people fall into when transitioning to | scrum. An experienced scrum master should never let this happen | though. | res0nat0r wrote: | I've been at jobs now for ~7 years and subjected to this. | Everyone has to list what they're working on, everyone else | ignores what is being listed/talked about until it is their | turn and I feel like I'm repeating myself 10x a day. It sucks. | tanseydavid wrote: | This is the most common example of the Cargo Cult version of | Agile/Scrum. | giulianob wrote: | Definitely my biggest gripe is story points + estimations. It's | just completely flawed. We should be thinking more probabilistic | (i.e. there's an 80% chance we'll get this done in 2 weeks). We | should be doing that by running actual models on past work rather | than gut feelings. | | If you want to listen to a couple of guys I used to work with who | really know what they are talking about, check out this series: | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC758reHaPAeEixmCjWIbsOA/vid... | frugalmail wrote: | That's why Kanban with throughput/cycle-time makes so much more | sense. | jimbob45 wrote: | https://owenmccall.com/high-performance-role-process-vs- | outc... | | This article gave me clarity between the two philosophies. | Kanban is about perfecting the process and trusting that | results will naturally come as a result of that process. | Agile is about attaining the outcomes and then focusing on | what works for those outcomes. | | I agree that Kanban makes more sense but Agile allows | managers to point the finger at devs instead of having to | point the finger at themselves. | matwood wrote: | I see probabilistic accounting for unknowns. An 80% chance | would have some a small amount of unknown, so if the task was 3 | points, I would bump it to a 5 to account for the known. And, | since points are not linear, the larger task automatically | grows proportionally, i.e. 8 -> 13. | giulianob wrote: | Points are flawed. Whether you have them grow linear, | exponentially, or fibonacci doesn't make a difference. The | fundamentals are flawed. They cover it in their videos and in | more depth their talks/books. | UK-Al05 wrote: | Monte Carlo estimations and probabilistic estimates take | longer to do. | | I don't know how they do it, but you used to have to group | stories to stories of similar effort done in the past in | order for the simulation to take into account story size. | Otherwise your model will be effected by things like | stories in different components taking more effort to do. | | Putting stories into rough size pots is essentially what | pointing is. | imbnwa wrote: | I remember noticing this on my first frontend job 5 years ago. | How are in hell are they accurately measuring any kind of | performance? I'm sure it can actually be done but enterprise | half-asses even that, likely because keeping it all slightly | arbitrary allows for more ambiguity to leverage against workers | (keeps them paranoid rather than certain, elites don't like | safety amongst workers). | hinkley wrote: | > How are in hell are they accurately measuring any kind of | performance? | | You aren't, and that's the grift. | | I force developers to do something they are bad at. They get | better, but they're never 'great' at it. So I can withhold | raises they deserve because I'm punishing them for what | they're not good at instead of rewarding them for what they | are great at. | ipnon wrote: | I wonder how much more accurate estimations would be if we had | engineers actually draw probability curves that are then | aggregated and analyzed. As it stands now, having had some | experience getting burned, I always give my estimate that's | really at the tail end, and I have become exceedingly efficient | at explaining why that estimate is how long it will "really | take." | giulianob wrote: | Estimating a single task is only really important to keep | your cycle time in check and have the conversation about | "should this task be broken down?" | | Estimations from engineers shouldn't be used to forecast when | a feature will really be done. That's where the model comes | in and probabilities comes in. | alephu5 wrote: | I understand your gripe but in a business setting you need some | estimate of cost, even if it's on the order of hours, days, | weeks etc. In my experience it's often cheaper to just get | stuck in rather than trying to accurately predict the effort, | since a single developer prototyping some solution for 10 hours | goes further than 10 developers in a meeting for an hour. I'd | say call a spade a spade, and put time estimates on these | tasks, and admit that velocity is a measure of your bias (if | you correctly estimate it will always be 1). | | What really gets me about story points are the Agile folks who | say "story points are a measure of complexity not effort/time". | As if adding more complexity in the same amount of time were a | good thing... | serial_dev wrote: | One approach I want to try one day is described here in the Shape | up book. It's free and takes around 2-3 hours to read cover to | cover. The idea I liked the most is that it made me shift from | "How much effort and time we need to solve the problem" to "How | much effort we are willing to spend on solving the problem, then | find a solution that matches that 'hunger', 'willingness'". It | makes simplifications of solutions viable. | | But the books is full of gems, so my two sentence overview | doesn't do it justice. Read it here https://basecamp.com/shapeup | | With that said, I don't expect any manager to allow us to try | out. People love that they can hear people every day that they | are all very busy. | | My current Scrum experience is from a large retail company. Our | mobile app team of ~8 devs tries to keep up with the web team of | ~50 devs (or even more, I just started and we work remote, I have | no clue about the exact numbers). | | The schedule, roadmap is mapped out for at least the next year. | | Then, the Scrum doesn't make any sense. We can't decide what's | important for the user. We can't work on bugs (that makes the | lives of our users miserable) because we work on big feature | launch X, and if we don't finish, it will jeopardize big | migration Y in 2 months, and then it'll make big relaunch in | Country Z impossible in 4 months. | | It's waterfall with two-week crunch times and daily standups. And | our ratings in the app store are constantly declining. But hey, | at least we are on time, no matter how terrible our app is, in | Jira it says it's shipped so don't whine about software and | product quality. | | During my whole career (about 5-ish years), I didn't find a place | where a standup every day made sense. I think two or three sync- | sessions per week would be perfect. Daily standups just made | anxious, nobody listens to the others, you either say too little | or too much, and the original promise of standups just didn't | match my every day experience: we never found blockers we | wouldn't have found otherwise, etc... In my opinion, pair/group | programming (2-3 ppl) is thousand times better. | mathgladiator wrote: | Fundamentally, it's about discipline. The problem is that people | don't know how to balance. | | Management needs tools to detect (1) slippage, (2) true cost, (3) | emerging issues. | | Engineers need to not silo, work together, make progress, and | share status. | | Amazon would do it at 11am, and it would last no more than 10 | minutes for a small team. Every two weeks, management and | engineers get in a room to holistically determine where things | are at, and then they go and report status up. | | What I would tell teams that I bootstrap is that the process | itself doesn't matter, but the team needs a shared discipline to | be effective. Their team has desired outcomes and everyone needs | to be accountable for making progress. | myth2018 wrote: | The pros and cons are typically thought of as intrinsic | properties of Agile in general. But they are not. | | Agile has a number of assumptions regarding organizational | culture and the people involved on the project. Those assumptions | are usually not discussed very often, which is bad, since I | believe they are typically related to those many cases of failed | Agile implementations that end up getting different explanations | depending on how one likes/dislikes Agile. | | To summarize what I'd like to answer about your question: | | Pros: | | - They are great tools to break larger projects into smaller | chunks and to keep track of their progresses. Experience shows | that it's easier to reach success on smaller projects, and | sprints and daily meetings are ways of emulate such sort of | project even when working on larger ones. | | - There's an opportunity of catching and fixing schedule | slippages, requirements misunderstandings and other sorts of | deviations before they get too expensive to fix. | | Cons: | | - You need a bigger deal of maturity and commitment of people | involved. As IT professionals, we usually complain about users | being unprepared for working on Agile projects, but we have to | admit that many professionals show a significant decrease in | performance when they are not under a certain level of healthy | pressure. | | - When you favor people over processes and communication over | documentation, a higher level of mutual trust is required. You | can't find that everywhere, for a number of reasons. Some say | that such organizations are not prepared to work under Agile | rules. Some are more pragmatic and adapt. I stick with the | latter. Agile talks a great deal about embracing change on | requirements, and I don't see what is the point of being a purist | and refusing to adapt the method to deal with risks. | jimbob45 wrote: | What matters is critical thought in optimizing whichever | methodology you use for your team. | | No methodology works right out of the box and it's insane to | think that any could. You have to look at your specific | requirements and mold Agile around your team. Agile literally | says to do this but most just ignore it. | | The more thought you put into your methodology, the better it | will work. I know most want Agile to replace critical thought | because they don't want to have a target on their back if things | go wrong but there is no substitute. | mdlm wrote: | The daily standup is not part of agile. | | Agile is defined here: http://agilemanifesto.org/ | mytailorisrich wrote: | The manifesto lists principles. Principles must be implemented | and turned into processes in order to actually produce | software. Scrum's daily stand-up is a process, a tool, to | implement the following principle: | | " _The most efficient and effective method of conveying | information to and within a development team is face-to-face | conversation._ " | | And it also contributes to this one: | | " _The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge | from self-organizing teams._ " | g051051 wrote: | _" The most efficient and effective method of conveying | information to and within a development team is face-to-face | conversation."_ | | That statement indicates just how broken the whole idea of | "Agile" is. | gijoeyguerra wrote: | I believe the daily standup is part of XP | (http://www.extremeprogramming.org) which is an Agile Method. | sli wrote: | It's part of Scrum, which itself is also an agile method. | [deleted] | timwaagh wrote: | Daily stand-up has the pro from a management perspective that | people feel pressure to perform. It does make sure people focus | on the things they should be focusing on. The associated con is | that not everyone performs under pressure. | | The pro of having a sprint is that the team knows what they can | do in advance. I don't need to ask my boss for a new task, I just | pick the topmost of the board that's not been worked on. The con | is sometimes added pressure to finish a sprint (beyond normal | pressure and without real-world cause) and a lot of time wasted | in team wide meetings to plan a new sprint. | | 'refinement' meetings as far as I understand are unfortunately | usually a waste of time. | | Estimations in terms of 'effort' points are a recipe for failure | because ultimately they will be converted into man-hour units yet | were not supposed to think of them as time but 'complexity'. As a | result velocity and burn down tools are just a cause for strife. | I'd recommend using a normal time unit instead. Skip the | conversion. | | The other way these things can possibly be made useful is if the | most important metric is not velocity but reliability (which most | teams don't use but is used in at least one team in my org). | | Personally I don't like agile/scrum but if I'd have to do it | myself I would keep at least some elements, like the board you | can take tasks from. Standups I would like to see alternatives | for. Estimations I would try to do myself or maybe have a tech | lead do. I wouldn't even bother communicating it with the rest. | Ultimately I never learned anything besides agile scrum so I'd | have to adopt at least parts of it no matter that I dislike it. | dmead wrote: | No. | | Agile/xp started at Chrysler as a way to push back on management | on give engineers a chance to pace/structure/set expectations for | their work | | Modern agile is just a management framework used as an excuse to | micro manage the shit out of your work force. | imbnwa wrote: | Yeah, it's not complicated. What's crazy is the way lots of | engineers rationalize all this instead of just being empirical. | I think software selects for authoritarian personalities to a | degree, who are quite comfortable pretending to be avatars of | rule of law (they are merely messagers who can also disavow | merely being a messenger) rather than looking at what's | actually happening in front of their eyes, like the adversarial | nature of most Product teams in most mediocre orgs. | gijoeyguerra wrote: | Yes. If by Agile you mean development practices like continuous | integration (periodically integrating changes into a single | environment so that the system can be tested) and creating short | feedback loops like devs testing their code; and by Scrum you | mean creating team routines for reviewing assumptions and the | team talking directly to customers; and periodic reflection to | improve processes, then yes, I do. | | Daily Standups are supposed to be Daily Planning Sessions for the | Team. But the common implementation has devolved into status | update meetings. | | So the con is that, more likely than not, it will be a status | update meeting, in which case, a waste of most people's time. | | If it's a Daily Planning Session, there are no cons, only pros. | | The pro is team alignment, with each other and with project | objectives and goals, with only a maximum of 24 hours for | possible misalignment. | | Misalignment is ALWAYS the problem. Daily Planning Sessions help | mitigate that ineveitability. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-04 23:01 UTC)