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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?"
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.
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.
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.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.