Interesting Links for 20-05-2018

[andrewducker]

This is the very opposite of my experience with Scrum/Agile. Comes across as both needy and arrogant, and I'd hate to have to work with the person who wrote it.

(tags: development software agile programming )

Estonia To Become The World’s First Free Public Transport Nation

(tags: transport Estonia )

The theocratic democracies of Iran and the UK

(tags: religion iran uk politics government )

Why do LGBT LDs get so annoyed when people say the Lib Dems "acheived equal marriage"?

(tags: libdem marriage lgbt )

Five whys and the cult of the root cause.

(tags: process philosophy learning )

Tomorrow's cities: The park with four seasons under one roof

(tags: cities thefuture nature environment )

Targeting job ads at the CEO of the company you want to work for

(tags: advertising jobs )

The prime minister is boiling the Brexiteer frogs: the water is getting hotter and none of them has jumped out of the pan

(tags: UK europe )

Evidence that drinking baking soda can promote an anti-inflammatory environment

(tags: inflammation )

Tories take four-point lead over Labour in latest survey

(tags: politics polls Labour Conservatives )

The cold war nuclear bomb warmed by chickens

(tags: history nuclearweapons chicken )

Comments

[skington]

As it happens, we dropped sprint partially because we weren't doing one thing for a fortnight and then switching to something else. (How would that even work, anyway, if you couldn't neatly divide all the work available into fortnight-sized chunks?)

But for the brief period when we did, by dint of people working flexitime and in different time zones (US, UK and Russia), the scrum meetings were unavoidably in the middle of the working day. And there's no telling where you'd got to before a scrum meeting became imminent; maybe there's only 15 minutes between the natural stopping point and your meeting, but maybe if you've finished something and your next thing is going to be large and consequential you might be unlucky and need 2 hours of uninterrupted time. Maybe I'm lucky, but I don't normally have an hour of admin stuff to do every day.

Look, it's not like we're waterfall-worshipping brutes; we have version control, continuous integration and code review, we do test-driven development, we refactor our code base to avoid tech debt, and all sorts of other sensible things that most programmers would naturally do without being told about them by someone trying to sell a buzzword-ladel book or course. It's just that on the narrow point of daily scrum meetings, we didn't find them useful.

[ironymaiden]

ah, missing data point! yes, I agree that scrum doesn't work well with distributed teams - been there. it was indeed a bad fit and an unrewarding chore, someone always got screwed on timing, it was easy for people to tune out of meetings or feel left out. (we had enough people to reorganize by geolocation, but obviously that's not a fit for everyone.)

[andrewducker]

I've used it with half the team in Edinburgh and half in India, seemed to work fine.

(Although I prefer teams in one location in general)