An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can’t imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we’re both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I’ve never heard before in my life. “Agile Testing”. “Backlog Grooming”. “Scrum of Scrums”. I was like “dude, none of those words are in the bible”, went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what “Scrum” meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered “Scrumban” already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out “credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses” as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase “Agile 2” and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would’ve gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    3 months ago

    Scrum: the methodology when The Mgt. says “agile” but will accept nothing less than waterfall in practice

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    “The common people pray for integration tests, healthy production, and five nines that never end,” SWE Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their Scrum of Scrums, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    yeah, enterprise agile is a whole thing. for companies who want to do agile. how do you do agile? well you hire Agile Practitioners, of course!

    see also this for further psychic injury

  • antifuchs@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    Yes we do AGIle: we ask ChatGPT what our customers want and then ask it to write software to fulfill those requirements. Every two weeks it writes up some imaginary sprint retrospective meeting notes. Planning poker doesn’t work so well, this iteration isn’t so good at bluffing yet.