Microsoft Lauds Scrum

under_score writes "According to eWeek.com Microsoft is adopting the agile methodology called Scrum to get software built faster. Is it working? They seem to be claiming that Scrum and Extreme Programming have helped them get recent releases such as SQLServer out the door faster with better quality. Many other large organizations are also adopting agile methods including Yahoo, and Google. Are agile methods the next big thing in software development?"

Comments

Doubtful about the speed

[dnoyeb]

I find methodologies are like other tools. If they buy you time, and your dilligent, that time will be spent on quality. So its not likely to both buy you time & quality. If you seem to have more time its only because you have not spent it on quality.

This is a new thing?

[sparkhead]

From the article: So Scrum is one process--the idea that teams meet once a day for half an hour, figure out what they're going to do then go off and do their work very quickly.

Well, yeah, we call that a daily team meeting. Been going on since, oh, forever.

As far as XP goes, don't think that's going to be a hot methodology for too much longer.

Re:This is a new thing?

[sparkhead]

I checked out the Wikipedia entry on Scrum, and if you'd like to fill in the missing details, please do so. What it says is in bold, what I would call it is not:

Characteristics of scrum

* A living backlog of prioritised work to be done;
An updated prioritized bug and feature list.
* Completion of a largely fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints;
Picking a set of items and fixing them quickly.
A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised.
Progress and issue review.
A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.
Planning.
A brief heartbeat retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint.
Post mortem review.

What's truly new here? I'm not asking to be a wiseass, I genuinely would like to know what this is apart from relabelled standard practices.

I went to the Control Chaos site on Scrum and the header states "It's about common sense". OK, so why give it a stupid label with overblown descriptions? The "what is scrum" section on that site reads like a Dilbert strip.

Re:This is a new thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The news is (or was when Agile first came about) was packaging these practices into a methodology. And giving it a name - a name, as we all know, is the most important part of a project.

Ten years ago, and often still today, a mainstream software engineering textbook started with "design errors are expensive to fix while programming". Which is a slippery slope that inevitably leads to the Waterfall Model.

So most companies (not all!) took the Waterfall Model as an unquestionable law of nature. Monolithic upfront requirements specifications carved to stone, etc.

Agile methodologies _think_ about the "obvious to any hacker" process and _measure_ it. They take what looks like chaotic uncontrolled hacking and, by thoughtfully selecting the right parts of the chaos, make something that can be directed to achieve the desired result.

Sure there have always been programmers who used bits and pieces of Agile tricks. But rarely in a controlled, designed, documented, measurable way. Not in a way that is taught to every new employee, which is what you'd do with a systematically applied methodology.

If you have for decades systematically used a well-thought-out collection of Agile principles you should have written a well-argued book that proves how your methodology kicks Waterfall Model's butt. If you aren't a book-writing kind of guy you could have ghosted the book. It's too late now to say "I always used a provably better methodology than the Waterfall Model, I just never bothered to tell anyone" :-)

Re:This is a new thing?

[Scurrilous Knave]

I've been in the software biz for a long time, and I've come to believe that the salient point is not what the "next big new thing" is in software development methodologies, but that there always is a next big new thing, every few years. To me, this means they haven't found one yet, at least one that works. Oh sure, most of them have contributed some new ideas and some benefits, but all fall short of the elusive goal, and more importantly, of their own promises.

Here's the way I envisioned it: A software manager and a hardware manager are playing golf. The HW manager says, "Man, my shop just started using CAD/CAM/CAE, and our productivity went up by a factor of three, and our error rate went down by the same amount!" The SW manager says, "Man, I gotta get me some of that."

The first time I heard about it, it was called CASE, for Computer-Aided Software Engineering. It had some interesting ideas, but wasn't the silver bullet for software development that CAD/CAM was for hardware.

And with CASE, as with every other silver-bullet attempt they've made since then, a flock of entrepreneurs showed up with products to hawk, promising to fix all the software manager's woes. I can't remember all the products and methodologies that have been foisted onto me by eager but underinformed managers, but they have been legion. Logiscope, CMM, Six Sigma, XP ... I've tried to block them from my memory. This Scrum sounds interesting, though as you and others are pointing out, not shockingly novel. But by the time it gets filtered through my company's Bogosity Injector, it'll be an embarrassment.

So why is that? Why haven't software developers gotten the same sort of help from automation and rigorous methodology that hardware designers have gotten? Here's where I lose my score: Because software is hard. It is, in many important ways, more difficult than hardware design. I believe that software design and development is the single most complex and difficult human endeavor ever undertaken. (Of course, as a programmer, I would think that, now wouldn't I?)

Let the flames begin!

Deadlines

[aussie_a]

Looks more like developers are being pressured to achieve ridiculous deadlines, with a fancy name tacked onto the pressure. I also wonder what sort of security is being done to programs developed via the scrum method. Is the scrum JUST for the programming (and/or the preceeding stages)? Or is it the whole thing, testing included, in this "quick, quick" method? If it's the latter, I can't see how testers are going to be able to truly secure the software, so we'll continue to get unsecure software from Microsoft. Thanks a lot, you just made my wish to migrate to Linux increase.

big things

[famebait]

Are agile methods the next big thing in software development?

No, they are the current/i> big thing. No doubt the hype will pass, but I do hope and believe and they bring some things to the table that deserve to last.

The focus on the way people actually work, on optimising that in a realistic way, on work satisfaction, on recognising and handling uncertainty in stead of ignoring it, and on pulling the curtain on a lot of practices that everyone knows don't really work but kept pretending anyway. All long overdue lessons for a methodology-field too long too dominated by good-on-paper theory and wishful thinking for managers rather than real experience with what works.

Why XP works when it works.

[ankarbass]

When XP works, at least in some cases, it works not because it's the best methodology. But because it is the one that people will do. It is "A" methodology where there either wasn't one, or there was something in name only which people paid lip-service too. For the programmer and manager alike, XP is easy to grasp and start implementing right away. Compared to more traditional methods, it's a simple method that eschews excess paperwork and you can explain the basic idea over lunch.

I also think there is something to the transparancy of the work environment. It's a lot harder to read slashdot when you are "pair-programming" or all of your peers are sitting in the center of a large room. It might just be that you get more done because it is harder to slack.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that most managers have absolutlely no clue how to program or organize code. They can't really do anything useful in the design process. Each time something is built the programmers design and build everything without much more than stupidity raining down from the management team. Since managers don't know anything about the craft they're "managing," they don't recognize who is actually writting good code or designing robust systems and they tend to rely too heavily on the people who do nothing more than sit in the bosses office brown-nosing. As a result, many projects fail miserably or are badly designed, bug-ridden crap when they fianaly get called a "final" release. Since these managers are always having their own performance reviews tied to a process that they totally do not understand, they invent new "management" schemes to make it appear they are adding something to the process in an attempt to make themselves seem different from their peers. Until managers understand the craft they pretend to manage, we will all be subjected to feeble management fads.

Remote pair programming is the "next big thing"

[Carl Rosenberger]

Agile methods have been around for a long time, they are not new, it's only new that big companies like MS find out that they work indeed.

In the meanwhile globalisation has advanced, there is a more efficient way to build software than to pile people up in cubicles. It's pretty much like an open source project:
- Get the best experts from all over the world for the theme where they are good at.
- Let them work from home.
- Let the team work in remote pairs, using VNC and Skype and change pairs frequently.

In this setup half-hour meetings every day do not work, because of the different timezones. A weekly meeting is good enough, Asterisk works fine for VoIP conferences, CVS email notifications about all checked-in work keeps everyone up-to-date.

This is how our company works. We are very happy with the cost and the quality of the work we get and with the lifestyle to work at home when you want and how you want.

Re:A good example?

[zullnero]

Ahh, typical XP newbies. The problem with most companies new to XP is they still want to do things the traditional way, ie., do it before a specified cutoff date. However, XP requires continuous releases, and Scrum is all about timeboxing each release. Soo...they probably tried to get too much done in too little time, went over the limit, realized that what they had wasn't acceptable, broke the XP rules, made some hasty fixes, disabled some harder to fix features, and got it out the door late anyway. The only reason I know that is because I've been through that.

XP isn't a magical cookie cutter solution you can just apply and expect instant $$, you pretty much have to build your team around it from the ground up, have experienced XP people around, etc. In fact, it really only works if the top level management really buys into it.

Insightful?!

[RAMMS EIN]

Sorry about whining about a post getting modded up, but what is this? Can't people calculate anymore? If Scrum buys you two months of time, and you spent half a month on improving quality, hasn't Scrum bought you both quality and time?

The above is just a simple counting argument. But if you actually look into the nature of things, it's entirely likely that a better process can increase development speed and improve quality. For example, if you improve the specification process, you could end up with a clearer specification that wouldn't be adapted so often while implementation is already going on. This reduces the time it takes to implement the specification, and causes it to be implemented better.

So, no, I don't think the parent is right that you can't have an improvement in both time and quality, or that if you've improved one, it's probably because you sacrificed the other. I do think that a lot of these methods are worse than worthless, but that's a completely different story.

Lucky You

[RAMMS EIN]

I say you're lucky. I'd much rather work for a company that watched what $new_thing is doing to others before adopting it, than one that jumped on every overhyped new thing that hit the press.

There is an unholy amount of crap being invented and hyped everywhere, and, in my experience, the things that are being hyped the most are never the best ones, or they aren't actually anything new.

A few examples:

  - Java, when new, was being hyped up the wazoo. This was the herald of object oriented programming and write once, run everywhere. Never mind that object oriented programming languages had existed for a long time, as had write once, run everywhere, and that Java isn't actually a particularly nice programming language (I get modded down every time I say something negative about Java, but this time I assume at least you will read it). With the advent of Java 5.0, it got a lot better, with things like generics and "foreach loops"; the performance problems have mostly been worked out, and stable and mature frameworks have been developed. And now your company has adopted it. Makes sense to me.

  - Ajax is the new hype of the website scene. All it is about is making websites more like regular applications through the use of existing technologies. I was doing this stuff in 1997, possibly earlier. It's still majorly broken in the exact same ways (you need to use a full HTTP request to get new data, and the server can't push data to you, except on some implementations). Maybe in five years these things will have been fixed (perhaps with the advent of XAML?) and your company will adopt them?

  - RSS feeds are all the hype. Basically, you can get news headlines from sites you subscribe to. It works just like regular HTTP, except that people have standardized on a, no, two, no, four formats to distribute headlines in, so that they are sort of compatible between implementations. Maybe in five years, when your company adopts the technology, there will be a single standard format? And maybe they will have solved the problems caused by the fact that data is being pulled (by clients who don't know when updates are available), instead of pushed (by providers who do know when content is available)? We shall see.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Re:So let's get this straight

[ergo98]

Microsoft is lauding scrum for assisting them in delivering a product late and with a smaller featureset than originally planned? Ok, that's certainly an interesting approach.

I've noticed a tremendous correlation between organizations, groups, and individuals in trouble (late projects, lack of talent and capability, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the capabilities of competing groups) and an acceptance and evangelizing of silver-bullet methodologies. It's like the long-time alcoholic giving speeches on how great it is to sober, or the homeless guy talking about the importance of going to school: It's the wrong person to be talking about it. Maybe serving as a ominous warning, but not as a credible source of advice about the right course of action.

Personally I'd like to hear what "methodology" Apple uses - They seem to continually manage to release great software. They don't seem to be buzzword laden, or full of ridiculous concepts like pair programming, but seem to use "traditional" programming models on reasonable plans with involved, motivated employees.

Except that agile methods were developed...

[israfil_kamana]

... by developers, for the most part, based on what works, not on what management thought SHOULD work. It's not a management fad, it's a simple empirical process. The whole point of scrum is to get away from management-induced fantasy, and rather to go with plan-try-measure-reflect-try-measure. It applies the scientific method to software development control.

Mostly what's pissing me off about this slashdot crap is that people who have never tried it are weighing in with opinions on how it can't possibly work, or how it's obviously just a fad. Sheesh.

My experiences with Agile

[Arandir]

One of our divisions at work has been using Agile for a couple of years now. Recently I've had to be involved in their process.

Aaargh!

If they're using real Agile, and not just picking and choosing the parts they like, then I can only conclude that Agile sucks. For years I have been bitching about the stupid waterfall model I've had to use, but Agile seems to be the exact opposite, with opposite but just as existant disadvantages.

First, where's the fricking specifications!?!? How the hell am I supposed to write code if I don't know what I am supposed to write? For a small team this informality may work, but for the fifty person team I'm on, it's maddening. "Just do it!" they tell me. So I do. And then throw it away because it isn't what they wanted.

Second, it's claimed that there are specifications, only that they're called "user stories". That's all well and good if you're writing a user interface, but most software is not a user interface. As a systems software developer, "user stories" don't do me much good because the user doesn't interact with the software I write. Heck, according to the user stories, my code doesn't even exist!

From what I can see of it, Agile is merely a reactionary response to old fashioned gated/waterfall processes. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just another damned unworkable process.

Re:That's what people sayd about O/O in the eighti

[Peter La Casse]

Nay-say all you want, but if you haven't tried it, then you have nothing productive to say for or against.

Pardon the slight topic drift, but this is crap. Having tried something improves somebody's credibility, but insightful analysis of an activity is possible without engaging in that activity. A criticism of, say, XP doesn't become invalid because the person making it hasn't tried XP. If it's valid, it's valid on its own merit.

In other words, when evaluating ideas, don't weight the speaker too much. Don't weight them too little either, but there's little danger of that, while there's lots of danger of only weighting the speaker and not at all weighting what they're actually saying (which can lead to a "cult of personality".)