Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

https://twitter.com/aboodman/status/1427137725119959046

by celadevra_ • 3 years ago

92 116 3 years ago

jraph4• 3 years ago

edit: whoops, it seems the author uses "sprint" to say something else than the agile stuff [1]. So this comment is a bit out of topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142781

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I strongly dislike sprints, but I would be open to discussion about them in a client project.

For something like Chrome which isn't driven by client needs that are difficult to understand, whose roadmap constantly needs to be adjusted, etc, I think sprints make no sense at all and are purely harmful.

Sprints are for having a fast feedback + adjustments loop with a customer whose needs are unclear / where the budget is a forever negotiation depending on how the project advances. If you are building a product for which you have full control over the roadmap, you don't need the 2 week sprints. You can still experiment and get fast feedback on new features as you like, but not everything requires this fast feedback.

The two week sprints are a strong constraint on your product development that might kill its long term stability because they require you to shoehorn maintenance tasks that don't necessarily fit in two weeks… in two week chunks, and I don't see the need for this in such a setting.

Even in a client project, sprints can be avoided. A regular (e.g. weekly) call with the client to discuss progress and adjustments + releases when there is a need for them can work very well. I actually strongly believe the two week sprints are overkill, not enough flexible and harmful in many projects. Task assignment of course needs to be done carefully, but this work can be done asynchronously or as-needed (which, agreed, might work better for very small teams).

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Sprints are for having a fast feedback + adjustments loop with a customer whose needs are unclear

Do they add any value there compared to having the same cadence of customer contact, while dev happens in a flow-based (kanban, etc.) model with as-ready delivery of value-producing units of work (i.e., stories) as completed?

I get that historically sprints were adopted as a way to do incremental, fast-feedback delivery as an alternative to “deliver at the end” project styles, and as an alternative to that, they seem to make sense. But they still incorporate the “deliver at the end” mindset, just with arbitrarily timeboxed aggregates of what is otherwise conceived as independent units of work. And if you’ve got independent, value-delivering units of work, its not too long until you realize that those are your natural and irreducible “deliver at the end” units.

datadrivenangel4• 3 years ago

Kanban is the way. Keep things flowing.

jraph4• 3 years ago

having the same cadence of customer contact, while dev happens in a flow-based (kanban, etc.) model with as-ready delivery of value-producing units of work (i.e., stories) as completed?

I'm currently on a project that works like this, without sprints, and clearly it works for us. Also, no standups. We communicate as soon as it's needed and not more (often) than needed.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

Planning should be a continuous and real time endeavor; and planning without your stakeholders input is a plan to fail.

SkyPuncher3• 3 years ago

I've found them incredibly useful for getting teams to be realistic about their bandwidth and throughput. They bring data to conversations and help engineers, designers, and PMs put actual numbers to decisions and trade-offs.

I think the formality of sprints is way overblown, but the cadence of them can be extremely valuable. Having stakeholders come together to discuss and tweak plans is super helpful. Ideally, _tweak_ is the keyword. If you have major changes sprint-to-sprint, something else is wrong.

In most cases, the discussion goes something like this:

* (A) We're on track. Everything is going well. Here's what's outstanding. If we get that done, what do we want to stretch for?

* (B) We've had some problems/things aren't moving as fast as we thought. Here's why. What should we do about it.

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

I get that historically sprints were adopted as a way to do incremental, fast-feedback delivery as an alternative to “deliver at the end” project styles, and as an alternative to that, they seem to make sense.

The root of most of what we call 'Agile' today goes back to a method for managing difficult clients when doing (primarily web development) consulting.

If you're not a consultant or you're not trying to defensively manage a difficult client then it's a poor set of processes for your development work to follow.

demondemidi• 3 years ago

I dislike sprints but have not seen a better alternative for teams of 50+ people.

HumanOstrich• 3 years ago

What about smaller teams?

jraph4• 3 years ago

I've only worked in small teams. Could one possible answer be to spit such big teams into smaller teams and organize / structure the project so that teams can be relatively autonomous?

caskstrength• 3 years ago

I dislike sprints but have not seen a better alternative for teams of 50+ people.

Team of 50+ people?! I wonder how do your Scrums look like. Is the work day over by the time you finish it?

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

That isn't a team, that's a department; I presume those people are either explicitly or implicitly divided into smaller teams / responsibilities?

janosdebugs3• 3 years ago

If you have a technical client, they will understand. If you don't, nothing in the world will make them understand. Ship a build too early and they will start complaining about superficial things that are on your todo list. Plus, nothing prevents you from shipping regular builds to the client without sprints either. It's often a good idea to set up nightly builds and make sure they are never broken. As you said, your PM or whatever you call them can still have calls with them, but there is no point in wasting the time of however many engineers work on it to regularly attend those calls.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: The other reason for scrum style sprints is predictability.

You can set deadlines like "feature X needs to be done by August", but that leads to overworking, cutting corners, etc.

You can instead set the scope / features - like you said, a browser has a long list of features that need to be built - apply a score / weight to them (story points), work in iterations, see how much of that relative score is done per iteration, then plot that so you can say "If we keep going like this, feature X will be done by August".

And if it needs to be done sooner, the project manager just has to put it higher up in the list.

jraph4• 3 years ago

I see an argument for estimating tasks here, not for sprints.

You can track progress on these tasks without sprint. Of course, this tracking needs to happen regularly and sprints is a possible implementation of this but you can do it without them.

hoten• 3 years ago

Does "sprint" mean something other than "chunk of work, usually 2-4 weeks in duration"?

etchalon• 3 years ago

It depends. In theory, it means a process in terms of how work is assigned, resolved and reviewed. In reality, it's meeting seems to be completely different between different organizations.

datadrivenangel4• 3 years ago

Scrum :TM: has a sprint delivering a new increment to a working piece of software.

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

Yeah, seems the author is using the term "sprint" to mean working more than 8 hours a day, not in the agile sense of short review cycle.

fulafel2• 3 years ago

Yes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sprint "A short race at top speed" (etc)

datadrivenangel4• 3 years ago

Major software projects can't be built in 2-4 weeks.

They're still inherently iterative though, so keeping iterations relatively small is valuable.

SkyPuncher3• 3 years ago

Most major projects can have an iteration delivered in 2 to 4 weeks. It might be a trivial component of the entire system, but it's still progress.

I'm on a multi-month project. Our first sprint's goal is:

* Get the repos in place.

* Get a dummy endpoint running and deployed

* Derisk some things on the FE

It's not much different than building, say a house. You can demonstrate progress in small pieces. Foundation poured, framing up, roof on, sheathing on, etc, etc.

khazhoux4• 3 years ago

Those sound exactly like the things any team would do on a new project, regardless of calling it Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or whatever.

I just don't see any difference between this and just having the philosophy: "Do first things first; do the next most important things next; don't bite off giant chunks but instead break them up."

psunavy034• 3 years ago

No one is expecting you to build the entire thing in 2-4 weeks (1-4 weeks to be accurate if we're talking Scrum). The intent is to have a potentially shippable increment at the end of 1-4 weeks which you can demo to a customer (or someone who can credibly speak for them) and get feedback.

The idea is that when you combine software, markets, and people's opinions, you're now in a complex adaptive system, where you acting within the system changes the system, and where you can never know enough about it to make long-term plans any more than you can forecast what the weather will be on management's "due date." So you use fast feedback loops to learn as you go and build the right thing as it's needed now, not two years ago.

JimDabell4• 3 years ago

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts. Sprints are just a way of breaking up work into discrete periods of time. There’s nothing about them that implies “drama, broken marriages, or broken families”. If you don’t finish the work you had planned to during a sprint then you fail the sprint, talk about why during the retro, then do a better job of allocating work in the next sprint. You don’t ruin your marriage over it‽

As for the rest of it, it seems like you can summarise the whole thing as “it’s good to have experienced team members”? Sure, but I don’t see why that’s a particularly novel insight.

psunavy034• 3 years ago

And this is why many agilists prefer to use the term "iteration," because "sprint" can be conveniently "misinterpreted" by toxic managers.

fredrikholm• 3 years ago

On that very note:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/liUiRfN9NzQ

audiodude• 3 years ago

At every former company, where we tried to use Agile or sprints, we ended up reaching a system where we just had basically "one big rolling sprint". Every two weeks, only a few tasks were actually done, and every task got pulled into the next "sprint".

Combine this with the fact that we weren't delivering any artifacts at the end of the sprint, so we didn't have any feedback from stakeholders and weren't really iterating either.

JimDabell4• 3 years ago

we ended up reaching a system where we just had basically "one big rolling sprint".

But there’s no such thing as “one big rolling sprint” though. If it’s “one big rolling…” then it can’t be a sprint. It’s like dehydrated water. It’s conceptually incoherent.

To untangle the wording of this, when you say your process became “one big rolling sprint”, what you’re actually saying is that you stopped using sprints, aren’t you?

BaseballPhysics2• 3 years ago

Sounds like you would've been better off with kanban. Did you ever consider switching?

YZF• 3 years ago

From my experience it can work. I've worked on a team where we got really good at estimating, had really useful planning sessions, a good backlog. Worked pretty well and had some advantages in terms of getting the team to be engaged and take ownership.

The problem with Agile in general is that it can easily be twisted around to make anything you want. A great team doesn't need agile methods, but it can use them and still be great, and possibly even get some improvement with careful use. Agile intended to fix organizations but organizations don't want to be fixed, and certainly not by a bunch of software people...

ssss11• 3 years ago

In my experience I’ve found (1) some teams don’t embrace it, (2) some teams don’t break down large tasks or (3) it’s not suited to the work. Each of these result in your rolling sprint. I absolutely hate seeing buzzwords for the sake of them but often the work simply doesn’t work well with sprints.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

That sounds like a lack of discipline and retrospection. This is also the problem I have with scrum; people don't stick to the process, and cite how the agile manifesto says that the process isn't important.

But this is a misconception. Stick to the process (religiously) at first, then assess how it works.

In this case: you did not meet your sprint goals, which either meant you overcommitted (meaning the next sprint you pick up less work), the tasks did not meet the definition of ready (that is, they could not be finished in a single sprint), or you had impediments that weren't solved on time. All of those need to be spoken out loud during a retrospective session, and action undertaken.

Not having any artifacts isn't the issue, you still need to set a moment to stop your work, review what has been done, consider what went well and what could be better, learn and improve.

If the learning is that scrum doesn't work for you - and you can show that you did it properly - then there's other processes that might work better for you, as suggested.

siva72• 3 years ago

That’s a sign of ineffective product management and bad feedback culture. When the foundation lacks, agile can’t be done successfully. I’ve seen what you described a few times but also many times where it works as long as the foundation is good.

antisthenes2• 3 years ago

If you don’t finish the work you had planned to during a sprint then you fail the sprint, talk about why during the retro, then do a better job of allocating work in the next sprint.

You don't even "fail" the sprint, that's a bad attitude. You just consider work spilled over and take on less work + spillover work next sprint.

There's only cause for concern if you repeatedly have spillovers every sprint - that's usually mostly a manager issue, and sometimes IC's.

Ideally you only have spillovers because of things that were not under your control - power outages, 3rd party vendor outages, etc.

lionkor• 3 years ago

Or you might have spillover because the team is very new and hasnt quite agreed on the value of a story point yet

xeromal2• 3 years ago

I've been working since 2010 and every single company that drinks the agile coolaide has turned into a death march.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

Same, but my experience isn't the same; in my experience it becomes boring because every sprint is the same, predictable, stable, little pressure, churn out one feature after the next. The companies may have drank the kool-aid but didn't let go of their existing management structures involving deadlines. And the developers / scrum masters / product owners / coaches did not protect their teams or processes.

atoav2• 3 years ago

As someone who developes software I can tell you that I have seen those three work:

A) if I am motivated, in the mood and it is my project I can program a thing in one go (e.g. if I have no dayjob, healthy breaks, time for sports, etc)

B) One of my employers wanted software, while my dayjob was something else. I told them I can do it if I get a fixed day on which my other responsibilities don't need to be taken care of. After half a year the project was finished. The biggest delaying factor were external partners who used the "sprint" model.

C) I do my current private project on two mornings in the week before work when I have time, it makes good progress.

If you need to constantly crunch to finish things you are either bad at management or you have perpetual bad luck, one of which is more likely.

Everything if done well takes a certain amount of time. And because things never go as planned and requirements change you can multiply that time by the value of pi. Additionally you should ensure that time is actually available for your employees and not something where they need to fulfill other crap (especially not your crap). If your employees are not totally incompetent (your responsibility again), you should be able to finish that project without a single hour overtime or any need to crunch at all.

The problem starts when managers confuse how long they wish something would take with how long something actually takes. Often managers promise things go faster because they don't dare to break the illusions of their superiours (or gamble on the slim chance that they can whip their team into finishing faster to then reap the fruit of that success).

Things take as long as they take. Multiply by arbitrary, pessimistic safety factors, you will finish it slow and steady on time, while still leaving space to try some things out.

michelangelo• 3 years ago

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably.

That’s absolutely not what’s written there and I’m surprised the context - and the narrative goal of the article - is not being grasped.

To put it more simply and distill it even more the gist is: “senior professionals know how to work and can manage their work structure/pace”.

jjav3• 3 years ago

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts.

I don't think so. That's why sprints are so toxic. It's even right in the name. A 100m run is a "sprint", but nobody expects you to maintain that pace for a marathon. Much less for a multi-decade career. But in software you're expected to be in a sprinting pace all life long. And even increasing your "velocity" constantly. If that's not a death march, what is.

Sprints are just a way of breaking up work into discrete periods of time.

There is not rational purpose to this. If the work takes 4 days, there's no reason to fabricate an artificial sprint boundary that forces you to break it down into two 2-day tasks just to fit into the confines of this imaginary sprint. It'll still be done four days from now.

kanzenryu2• 3 years ago

The name sprint comes from rugby, and just refers to what the team would be doing together to succeed (sprinting to the other end of the field with the ball).

mjfisher2• 3 years ago

The rational purpose is this: sprints should be a way of trading off lower utilisation for more predictable delivery.

However, your example is unrealistic - you wouldn't split that task into two. If it won't fit comfortably in the sprint it waits for the next one.

It varies hugely by team and process, but where scrum/sprints are a good fit a reasonable first level of sprint loading seems to be a limit at about 70%. E.g. if an engineer has ten days available to work in a sprint, no more than 7 days of estimated work are pushed their way. The other 30% is assumed to be code reviews, meetings, pairing, bugfixing etc.

If that 70% is too high or low, it can be adjusted.

For everything else, there's Kanban.

memefrog• 3 years ago

You're confusing etymology and meaning. The fact that 'sprint', in completely different usage, has that meaning, does not mean any of that connotation carries over to this context.

There is a clear rational purpose to breaking tasks up into parts. There are atomic units of work. Very few tasks can't be broken up into two-week segments.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

But the term "sustainable pace" is also mentioned a lot in the literature.

An increase in velocity does NOT mean "work harder"; an increase in velocity should come natural as your codebase expands, you get more reusable components, your team gains experience, etc.

Example. New feature, estimated at 5 story points. One part is a button, takes you half a day to build it.

Next feature, very similar to the other one, 5 story points. But this time you have a button component already, so you can just reuse it. Same points delivered, less time spent, meaning you have time to pick up another story, meaning your velocity goes up.

Nobody, least of all proponents of scrum / agile methodologies, is saying that you should work harder, do a death march, etc. It acknowledges that software development is an infinite and long term process.

Scrum does NOT work with deadlines. It works with predictability; your team's average velocity and the story points of upcoming stories are known, it's then up to the product owner to set priorities if they need a feature live at a certain point in time. Missed deadlines then become bad planning and prioritization more than employees not working fast enough.

There is not rational purpose to this.

Just to highlight this: The rational purpose to sprints is for project management to be able to look ahead and be able to say "we expect this feature to be done in X weeks time". It doesn't mean that a 4 day task should be done in 2 weeks. A sprint is just a unit of time, it isn't a promise.

eternityforest• 3 years ago

The purpose, as I've seen(I've never done true formal agile but I think it influenced some of the people I worked) is that some businesspeople seem to like to see constant visible progress.

4 days is too long for them to wait, they get antsy and think nothing is happening if you can't actually show them something they can understand in a day or two.

I think it actually affects the code, everything has to be taped together tiny bits, because you can never do anything that doesn't show results fast, so you if you need a framework or an architecture or a plugin system, it's really hard.

But agile says that's fine because you're going to be doing first drafts and throwing away code anyway....

fulafel2• 3 years ago

The word "sprint" has meanings outside of Scrum, I think it's used here in the dictionary meaning.

coldtea• 3 years ago

They seem to be using “sprint” and “death march” interchangeably. These are two entirely different concepts. Sprints are just a way of breaking up work into discrete periods of time.

That's already the same as saying "A, B, and C parts will be done in that period of time, then C, D, E, F" and so on.

So you already pressupose what's to be done by when. And even if you roll-over tasks that haven't been completed to the next sprint, you still have this concept of falling behind (which is what "talking about why you failed the Sprint doing the retro" reinforces - and that invariably will lead to death marches and the fool's errand of "doing a better job of allocating work in the next sprint").

Whereas what they describe is "A (or B or C...) will be done when it is done, and the same holds for the whole project".

So they work everyday 9-5, give it their best shot, and it is completed day by day, with no arbitrary deadline to have A, B, C parts completed by.

If by using sprints you're going to do the exactly same thing (just work 9-5 everyday, and your project is ready when it's ready), then you don't need sprints.

Sprints only make sense when you don't plan on doing that, but to use them as a yardstick of being on some schedule or falling behind, and as a way to force developers to work overtime to "keep up with the planning".

lamontcg3• 3 years ago

If you don’t finish the work you had planned to during a sprint then you fail the sprint

that 'failure' bit right there is some bullshit that should get cut out.

cachvico• 3 years ago

Note: "sprints" in this context means "crunch".

From the tweetstorm the article quotes:

The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!

mcny• 3 years ago

Microsoft is such a strange company. For the people I know who worked there, it was allegedly almost a vacation.

Why is there so much difference in work load in different teams?

harshalizee• 3 years ago

It's a very large company. Each org/vertical might as well be it's own company, and it was just that disconnected and isolated from each other.

There are entire teams maintaining ancient products that I've never heard of and there are teams working on cutting edge stuff in their vertical or industry.

Culture similarly varied widely between orgs. I moved from a very chill team to one in azure. It was the same as moving to a different industry altogether

paxys• 3 years ago

A project may or may not use sprints for assigning and tracking tasks.

A project may or may not have a lot of senior engineers with hands on involvement.

A project team may or may not be worked to the bone to meet tight deadlines.

A project may or may not be ultimately successful.

These are all independent variables that the author seems to be conflating into one.

As a counterexample I have worked on plenty of teams where we diligently used the agile methodology and everyone worked 9-5 and we were very successful with our product.

ergocoder• 3 years ago

I don't think that is what a death march means.

A death march is a dead-end project where everyone thinks it likely fails, but nobody says anything. Everyone is still marching. This often happens with a migration-like project.

Sprint is just a project management style which is appropriate when a lot of things are uncertain (e.g. user need, budget).

hinkley• 3 years ago

A death march is walking until you fall over dead.

In code terms it’s busting your ass and hurting your health to try to push out a release - which may or may not connect with users.

usefulcat2• 3 years ago

Disagree. I once worked at a place where 'death march' was an entirely appropriate description of a significant portion of the normal annual development cycle of a very successful product.

Of course they didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was nonetheless.

khazhoux4• 3 years ago

What a bogus claim. No piece of working software of any merit was ever written before Agile!

... um, I joke, but this is the attitude I see from every proponent of agile. "How can a team possibly deliver a product on time without sprints and ceremonies"? I've seen serious discussions about whether to use "Kanban" or "Scrum." They're completely different, you see: one has 4 columns for your open/to-do/in-progress/complete tasks, whereas the other has a list view for your open/to-do/in-progress/complete tasks!

"Agile" has bugged the hell out of me the last 13 years, and one of the main reasons is that the people who push for this the loudest, have never deployed a line of code in their lives: Project Managers and their ilk. Their livelihood depends on owning a process and reporting the state transitions of the actual engineering work.

I'm forced to have 2-week sprints at my company, and I just realized today that the Sprint Planning calendar entry --which I own for my team-- had expired a couple of weeks ago. Of course, no one on the team noticed because we're actually heads down merging code. But I'm sure the PMs will freak out.

Now, all that said, I do support teams meeting every 2 weeks to review tasks and priorities. That's fine. But do we have to pretend that's "Agile"?

usefulcat2• 3 years ago

If you read TFA, it's abundantly clear that the author is talking about death marches (they even use that word), not the agile meaning of 'sprint'.

khazhoux4• 3 years ago

I'm talking about sprints, as is Boodman in the tweet.

And having some proximal observation of the Chrome team at work, btw, Boodman is spot-on that that team kicked ass because they had awesome engineers and super-technical leadership.

psunavy034• 3 years ago

"Every" is a pretty big word, and it's a pretty immature attitude to write off whole groups of people.

You also don't seem to have much understanding of any of the key concepts of Scrum, Agile, or Kanban beyond "merging code is all that matters!" News flash: you "merge code" for a business who has business requirements and customers, and if you ship the wrong stuff, all you've accomplished is lighting lots of money on fire and wasting your professional life.

It's a common attitude among immature devs who can't get beyond the whole "I have the most important job in the company" mindset. I'd expect it out of a junior dev, but someone who has 13 years of experience? That's not the flex you think it is.

khazhoux4• 3 years ago

"Every" is a pretty big word, and it's a pretty immature attitude to write off whole groups of people.

"Every" usually doesn't literally mean "every", but I'm sorry that my experience across several large companies is that the people that demand following "Agile Ceremonies" are by-and-large Project Managers, and (with rare exception) not the engineers or the technical eng managers. I've seen this at multiple large companies. And I remember clearly how much awesome, robust software we shipped before Agile creeped in around 2008-2010, to then be told we were "doing it wrong" because our work wasn't broken down into 2-week sprints.

if you ship the wrong stuff

Two-Week Sprints are neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid this.

It's a common attitude among immature devs who can't get beyond the whole "I have the most important job in the company" mindset. I'd expect it out of a junior dev, but someone who has 13 years of experience? That's not the flex you think it is.

That's super ad hominem. I'd rather hear a specific counter-argument on the necessity of Agile sprints.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

Counterpoint, the people that strongly oppose agile practices the loudest have never managed a software project in their lives.

In your case, you've CHOSEN to ignore the scrum practices in favor of nose-to-the-grindstone death march. If your company says "we do scrum", that gives you and your team ammunition to say "no". Or in other words, poor planning on management's side does not constitute an emergency on yours.

Scrum practices, if done right, offer predictability. Management loves predictability. You should love predictability as well because it means you won't have to do overtime / stress.

yc-kraln• 3 years ago

Hey, so, I have managed a ton of software projects. I strongly oppose Agile, "agile" and nearly every variation thereof (SAFe is the worst). Not every software project is a website contracted to an agency for the lowest possible cost, and any software of any consequence has a lifetime of decades, not minutes, so "working code over documentation" is a fundamentally flawed basis, before getting into any of the other bullshit cargo-culting nonsense that flows from the agile methodology.

tgma• 3 years ago

Moral of the story: start with someone else's open source project.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

Isn't that pretty much every software project these days? Be it language, libraries, frameworks, etc. It often feels like a lot of software development is duct taping different libraries together.

fzeindl2• 3 years ago

It seems that the main and only problem "solved" by SCRUM is the awkward situation where a freelance-team or solo developer happily present the result of their (web-, ux-, app-)implementation that took them half a year, the customer realizes they wanted something else and both are angry at each other.

So now SCRUM has a feedback cycle that prevents that from happening.

It makes sense for UX and interaction-heavy parts, but not at all for systems and backend programming, which are much harder to divide into a workable backlog.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

It makes sense for back-end too though, especially in the context of a larger organization.

Teams A, B and C need features X, Y and Z from the back-end team. Back-end team says they will cost 3, 5 and 8 story points respectively. Back-end team's product owner talks to the teams to ask about priority. Z is planned for next sprint, X and Y for the one after. Teams A, B and C plan their work that depends on those features accordingly.

Everybody happy. We work with SAFe where that process of inter-team dependencies are formalized in quarterly "sprints" subdivided into 3-4 3-week team sprints. That's easy enough to explain at least, it's a shame the website makes it look so bad: https://scaledagileframework.com/

fzeindl2• 3 years ago

I am glad to hear that you use 3-week sprints. 2 week sprints are too short, yet everyone uses them without questioning.

Spiwux• 3 years ago

Reading the comments to this submission made painfully clear that a significant portion of HN commenters are posting their opinions without even reading the linked article first.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

This is the internet in a nutshell, and why crafting headlines and titles is an art, frequently used in "propaganda" to sway public opinion.

janosdebugs3• 3 years ago

I think the main issue with sprints is that people start feeling like robots. This hampers creativity and drive immensely. I've been in ste software industry for a good 15+ years and I have never observed the opposite. People start doing pointless busywork like ticket engineerinf instead of being enthusiastic about what they do and working towards that. I've had the displeasure of witnessing several teams die once Scrum was forced on them or they decided to switch themselves.

Sosh101• 3 years ago

I have experienced this too.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

That was one of my early experiences with scrum too. That said, I get it; from a higher up management position point of view, scrum gives you stability and predictability, which is what you build businesses with. Unfortunately, most companies are like this.

But there should be space for creativity and originality as well. Since this article is about Google, back when they were still considered a great place to work, one major factor was their "20% time"; they acknowledge that most of the work is boring, so they gave you a day a week to work on more creative endeavours. Every software company should do this. Don't make it an occasional hackathon kinda thing, make it part of every sprint or week or month or whichever unit. Give people freedom to create, without expectations.

Because if you don't give them that space, they will take it.

janosdebugs3• 3 years ago

I don't think the 20% is a good solution because it requires engineers to compartmentalize. If the 20% is more interesting than the 80%, how are they going to do good work on the 80%? Plus, show me a manager that's happy to let an engineer take a few sprints of accrued 20% time off from the normal work.

On the flip side, you can get most people to care about the engineering work they are doing if you don't burden them with unnecessary red tape. A good example for how this can work is how Valve [1] supposedly works: true multidisciplinary teams that are empowered to organize and work on a project as they see fit. This was the only way I saw teams work truly efficiently.

If management needs to know exactly when a project is finished, they just need to agree on a deadline with the team. Scrum isn't there to provide that, nor did I ever see it work. However, I have seen a lot of wishful thinking and make-believe metrics such as managers making up a project to be "5000 story points" out of thin air (based on 1-2% of the project being spec'ed out, even less being completed) and then doing deadline calculations based on that.

[1]: Valve handbook for new employees, page 16, https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications

d3vmax2• 3 years ago

You must understand that twitter is rewarding views/conversation to 'creators' via subscription. You must have noticed an uptick of blue tick accounts who drivel lame information but packed to stroke a conversation. This way they get payouts from twitter creator program due to engagement and impressions.

The blue tick also puts them on top of conversations; this is now used by Russians to create divisions in democracies with paid and useful idiot(s) accounts. For Elon, who is living in a selfish bubble, that is free speech and he keeps reposting conspiracy theorist.

In short, the whole platform is going to the gutter. Being a champion of the Internet from the late 90's, I can't believe where we are at now and how non-scientific fervor has grabbed every aspect of discourse (anti vax, flat earth, soros/gates, Q/Pizza/MAGA, etc).

JimDabell4• 3 years ago

This Twitter thread is two years old, posted long before Twitter’s current woes.

d3vmax2• 3 years ago

Yikes! My bad.

modeless• 3 years ago

What relevance does this have to a tweet from 2021?

abwizz• 3 years ago

we are experimenting with ways to have an inclusive global conversation.

there will be many more failures

miked85• 3 years ago

I'm not a big fan of agile, but right off the bat it seems clear that the author doesn't know what sprints are.

chalcolithic• 3 years ago

Not as a counterpoint but just to add some context: I used Chrome when it just came out. For a week. Couldn't stand it any longer - it was buggy as hell. Of course, now it is polished and the user experience is completely different.

Cthulhu_13• 3 years ago

It's a big project; they had senior developers with experience in building browsers, who realised that this would all of that plus the rest. They also knew that the 1.0 release would only be the beginning of the project, so the setup needed to be good, and the development practices needed to be sustainable.

This differentiates senior developers from the rest I think. Mind you, I can also understand why a lot of people - myself included - think "what's the point", given how (in my own experience), a lot of software - mainly front-end - is replaced every 5 years, and major architecture overhauls every 10.

My current employers is currently replacing their SAP-to-API middleware with some commercial point-and-click software to, drumroll please, AWS lambda functions written in Typescript. It's an improvement, because there's more transparency and performance measurement instead of things hidden behind a GUI, but it's also a risk because it's set up by consultants who will eventually move on to somewhere else.

Already there was suddenly a presentation that came across as Authoritative about how they have Chosen to use Kotlin. I don't know for sure if that was to replace typescript but... it really doesn't matter to me tbh.

Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)

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