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>What you described above is more like kindergarten

You ever try organizing and managing the work of multiple skilled tradesmen that feed into a single integrated product on tight deadlines? Do you know what works really well in that kind of environment?

Telling people what to do and then checking in on them to see if they’re doing well.

Is this kindergarten? I don’t remember being a skilled tradesmen working on building components for complex assemblies on tight deadlines in Kindergarten.

I concede that I am unfamiliar with what a normal “scrum” session looks like outside of what is said in the Agile manifesto and the many anecdotes floating around. I do know that Scrum took a lot of cues from TPS/Lean of the 80s and tried to feed it to Software.

And as far as I can see, it’s not working because the profession and the products do not fit this factory model.

What everyone seems to yearn for seems to match more closely to the model followed by magazines and other such publications. Product Management the profession mirrors more the Editor than the Production Manager, SWEs mirror writers/editors-at-large, etc.

Self respecting writers in any newsroom would balk at being subjected to daily scrums that take away from precious research/writing time. And to put some kind of regular pace on progress, metrics, etc. to what really is very bursty, deep focus work is also ridiculous. Whether it takes you 5 hours or 5 days to write the piece, so long as it is of quality and meets the deadline what does it matter. And even if you miss the deadline, you could alway be slotted into the next issue unless the piece was a cornerstone piece to the issue, in which case a good editor would have assigned it with ample time or given it to the best writer on the roster.

Hell I like this analogy. Might spend more time thinking about it and talking to SWE friends about it. Feel free to expand. Maybe this will free everyone from the shackles of Scrum.



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