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Author | SHA1 | Date |
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Yann Esposito (Yogsototh) | ae59840ef6 | |
Yann Esposito (Yogsototh) | 9ae2c4e0da |
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#+title: My Experience with Scrum
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#+description:
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#+keywords: blog static
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#+author: Yann Esposito
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#+email: yann@esposito.host
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#+date: [2021-08-30 Mon]
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#+lang: en
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#+options: auto-id:t
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#+startup: showeverything
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#+begin_notes
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My experience with Scrum in a small startup.
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Mostly negative, but there are good lessons to learn.
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#+end_notes
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I was a new recruit in a small startup.
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I started just about 6 month ago, and we did have a CTO, and 4 CEOs.
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Part of the team were remote, (the CTO and another member).
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The amount of work was huge and at the same time, I was really motivated
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coming from a big corp full of mega-boring technology and lacking of
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talent.
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Here I will regain a lot of freedom regarding my developer environment.
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A real computer to work with, use the latest techno using the latest trend.
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But, having 4 CEOs many clients, a lot of concurrency regardings tasks to manage.
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It was quite stressful and difficult to plan.
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They told us about hiring someone whose responsibility would be to plan the
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work, because it is a full-time work in itself.
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They guy looked cool, it told us about how he envisioned the work.
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It was "mostly" SCRUM, not full scrum. Mainly he will always be the scrum
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master, he will be responsible of planning, priotirizing and organizing tasks.
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This was indeed a lot of work.
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We welcomed him as we our hope was to be able to work on longer tasks than
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just quick 1-day tasks.
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Now the reality:
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- Every Monday morning was last for planning.
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- Every Friday afternoon was lost for retrospective
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- Every half morning was lost in daily standup (instead of 10min it latest
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generally about 30min to 1h30)
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- Every week, the 4h work on planning was changed entirely due to new
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market priorities, so every week we often made an exceptional new task
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planning for about 2 to 4h.
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To that you needed to add a few meetings, discussion about priorities, team
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spirit, etc...
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So looking at this you could imagine that I have a totally negative
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impression on SCRUM faced to the reality of people.
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Which is mostly true.
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But scum-like tasks organisation can be great for a few things.
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If you really have a clear plan with everyone involved and most
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difficulties have been though about in advance. This is a killer way to
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go from "planned" to "reality".
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What is wrong with scrum;
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1. Daily standups suck, this is mostly lost time
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2. Planning every week/2-week is terrible for medium to long term tasks
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(see a reference between important vs urgent).
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The main reason full SCRUM is terrible is because it narrow your mind to a
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sprint-long time to do any tasks. It mixes urgency with importance.
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And generally, really important tasks to make are left behind, most of the
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time being put on urgent tasks.
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Which for most product is terrible.
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Quite often it is better to eat the cake, keep a lot of fixes, urgent
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tasks on the side to take the time to work on the important stuff.
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The one that is hard to build, the one that will make the real difference
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in the market.
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Manager scrum/any kind of process common misunderstandings:
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1. Do your agile stuff (like work your ass off even on the week-end)
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2. Yes agile to have more control about you slackers
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3. Ah you have given a random number about the difficulty of the task, this
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mean I can translate it in number of days, and this is a contract ;)
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And all this kind of bullshit.
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It is normal to understand that managers need to have some vision about the
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time a task might take.
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It is normal to understand that managers need to see who is performing well
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or not, and how this could be enhanced.
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etc...
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But, Scrum looks like a magical solution. It is not.
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If fact, any kind of *process* could be and will be tricked and played off by
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the players.
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The only thing that matter is:
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- make a distinction between important vs urgent tasks
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- make every player want to play in the same game as the managers, people
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need to want to do something.
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