Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I'm tired of pretending software developers don't know their destination.

If you started making a task-tracking app, and after all the work for scrum end up building a video game instead, something has gone terribly wrong.




I think experiences vary greatly based on company and domain. I work on a team supporting features for an app that is used by tens of thousands of people every day. Yet, what we plan to produce at the beginning of the quarter rarely matches what we actually produce. Example: my team spent months working to integrate our app with a new data gateway service. We were, I dunno, 75% of the way there when executives decided the data gateway should not be used (this months after they said this same gateway was the future of the company). So, I'm not pretending when I say sometimes, I don't know my destination. Sometimes I think I know my destination, only to find that both my course and the destination have changed.


Didn’t Slack do that exact thing, but the other way around, and are now worth 20 billion?


The founder even did it twice. The last time he set out to make a video game, he came out the other end with Flickr


According to its inventor, Scrum™ was created to manage a team of dysfunctional COBOL programmers at a bank[1], not to find a Product/Market Fit (PM/F).

Instead of using an SDLC methodology here, use one of the relevant product frameworks for that, but needless to say, there is a large element of luck here, as finding a PM/F isn't guaranteed.

Usually you use low-tech SDLCs like Scrum/SAFe at the places that already have found PM/F, or those relying on violence (aka "taxation") as their main business model (e.g. military/government/public sector).

The only PM/F Scrum Inc found is how to make bazillions from useless certifications and training.

--

[1] Scrum | Dr Jeff Sutherland | Talks at Google

https://youtu.be/2L1oBLTICx4?t=1217


Plus they ended up with the most elaborate Easter eggs I have seen in a web app: https://slack.com/404


While I personally don't believe it, one could easily explain it with survivorship bias.


Yet I’ve seen agile/scrum ending up in exactly the situation you’ve described! It goes wrong more than it goes right and it’s about time the industry stops letting management dictate these “practices” to engineers.


Made me laught




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: