Scrum - agile trip 2

Scrum and me... me and scrum... it is a complicated relationship...My last 7 years was nothing but "move to scrum" "be agile" "save the world" (where world===company).
And scrum is like the cake. It is a lie.

I remember the first time we met. Scrum was like a blond, slender, tall Japanese woman.... interesting but really confusing. Our colleague brought the idea to our office (call him Golden Broom, and our office: The Colony). He had a bunch of cards with different colours, he draw a board (ToDo, In progress, Done) and mentioned the well known meetings. One of the main developers instantly bought more colourful cards where we could wrote our stories, and bugs, and whatevers. It started with one team, we successfully multiplied the amount of meeting hours by approximately 1000, but at least kept the production rate the same (its good and bad at the same time), and increased the frustration (or not... not sure about that). And Scrum, because we thought that is our light saber or I mean live saver, were introduced in every team, one by one, voluntarily (actually it was really voluntary, we really thought that will change our life). But we slowly realized Scrum did not solved any of our issues... but it did change a few things. We told ourselves "at least now we/our job are more visible", what was true, but no one wanted to see us/it.

My relation with Scrum did not change. I have been through a few process migrations now, and I never had the feeling: "wow, this works, Scrum is great". Even if there are problems with the team members, with the company, with the aspect of planets, the main problem is with Scrum. It cannot work. Well, that's not true, it can, but only on paper and in a really small subset of reality. Well maybe it is just me, but I think the process out of the shelve should be able to handle reality without raping it.

What's wrong with Scrum?
1. Its whole concept is just not true. Usually the team does not and cannot have all resources+access+knowledge what they need for their work. So they will have dependencies, and Scrum cannot do anything with that (well you can add an extra column). And it will strongly and randomly influence your velocity (the ultimate value).
2. The team does not work without any connection with the rest of the company (even if the Scrum master pipes all the requests). They occasionally have to help to other people, solve issues, and, BLASPHEMY!!! they have to fix bugs, do releases, because:
3. Scrum just gently forgets about the rest of the lifecycle. Staging testing, releasing, firefighting, hotfixes, service releases... "minor" things what randomly and not randomly influence your velocity again.
4. Scrum has no idea what to do with a non-homogeneous team, like DBA, QA, Dev (frontend, backend). They will be loaded differently during the implementation on an epic, and you cannot plan and utilize them easily (without moving them here and there, or ask them to do other things what is not their profession). But the biggest problem is with the QA-Dev opposition. QA and dev does different things. They cannot be each other substitutes in most cases. What a dev can pick up, a QA cannot, and vice versa.  QA is loaded at the end, they usually have to do testing outside of the sprint (staging, live release testing, etc)... So you will have sprints where the devs are not loaded while the QA is, or the devs could not finish their stories, so the QA could only do a little testing, and they were doing nothing or days (well, you know what I mean). Of course they can always help each-other out (=dev should do more testing) but in reality it does not work. Especially not for longer term.
5. list all your issues here what you get from the fact that the rest of the company need to be able to support your scrum ("process is for the people" not other way around, right?), they need to give you good product owners, the business needs to change their thinking, etc...

So at the end your velocity will be a joke. The number what you can deliver for sure will be much lower compared to the number what you can almost deliver. And this unpredictability will slowly degrade the commitment in the team.

I know, Scrum is not the silver bullet, it is not for any team, but as I see it is only for a team which is in a startup company, with almost every people in it, and they do not have too much users, or they are not on live, so they do not have to deal with bugs, super-important customers, or at least they do not have serious releases process. Where serious means someone has to do something for more than a day. So indeed it is not for all team, but for <0.001%.

And the real problem, that Scrum does help a little. If your organization was a chaos before, without traceability and visibility and predictability (well you wont have it here as well), then introducing Scrum can give you the false hope, that the improvements what you have achieved in the first weeks/months will stay, and all your issues/difficulties will evaporate. But in reality, you will always fail the sprints, so you will plan less and less till it will be ridiculous so you start to increase again, because there is no other way to ease the cognitive dissonance what you have (why we cannot do more if we can do more?). And everyone silently accepts the fact that the sprints are never done. You will often have sprint goals like: "complete the sprint", because the tasks are independent not coherent enough so actually the team is not sprinting to one direction.

At the end Scrum will be nothing else, then a way of organizing meetings and doing estimates, and managing tasks.

Solution comes in the next post.

Agile trip 1

The Agile manifesto - for someone in my age - is nothing but a collection of common sense. It is addressing issues what were issues before I was cloned... oh well lot before I started to work in this industry. I have never met anyone who thinks processes and tools can tell us how to do our jobs. I have never met with a product owner who wanted to see and read the documentation and ignored the software, or ever said: "The feature is awesome, straightforward, but unfortunately not every button is documented....". And even if the customer collaboration was far from perfect, no one ever followed the contract line by line, even if sometimes we should have done it for our own good. But I still often see we do not want to adapt to change. As testers we love to create plans (I don't) and follow them, and ask for detailed requirements what already contains everything so we do not need to use our brains anymore during our job, only if we want to for some reason. And as developers who are so into the details implementation or under the spell of a cool/new/rare/fancy tool/library so they want to use it for sure even if it is just does not make sense anymore. Or doing technology migrations, re-factoring/optimization/etc  for their own fun without adding any value to anyone, and keep doing that even if the whole world change meanwhile. Change is somewhat against our default mindset. We love change, but only planned ones. We love change but only those ones what we start. We hate continuously changing focus, re-planning our tasks, dropping things we love in favor of things we do not know. It seems we forget we are not raising children here.... we create software what can maybe live for weeks even if that piece of code is the best thing we created in our life. We are creating short living phantoms; not statues for eternity.  It is like a shoemaker who either working on one shoe during his life, or does not want to sell any of his creations...

Automation

I really love the autobots, the automatron, the automobile, the automauto, basically everything which starts with auto and end with suffer and pain....

Automation.... our silver bullet, life saver, job saver, mind saver.... I have made and work with a few automation framework (internal), and one thing always happens if you are not paying attention to it... it will be a heavy, massive piece of sh*t... why? you are a test engineer, you are not creating unit tests in these frameworks, so it is pretty sure you will have to implement some business logic (simplified form), you will execute complex, more complex scenarios, because your mind is critical you will do negative, unhappy, sad, destructive tests. You are working in an "agile" environment, trying to follow the code generators (alias developers) support the release, act as an internal customer support (and all these things are fun). You want to deliver the "tests" asap, they want you to deliver the "tests" asap. You try to avoid headaches so you wont revisit any story only if you have to, so you try to be fast, fast, fast....

And meanwhile everyone forgets your/our automation framework is an application as well. It needs maintaining, it must be structured, no code duplication, easy to learn, easy change, but most likely some of them will be true for you, who created it, but not for anyone else...

You end up with a regression test suite running for 4 weeks, because it was not designed to run it in parallel, or to have any kind of run optimization. But to add it you have to change everything. The code is completely unbalanced, some parts are good, others are so crappy you just do not want to open it. And the tests are te same.... some using an old part of the framework, in the others you tried out something else, the latest are working in a different way. It has so many tricks (workarounds) even yourself start to lose track, but you cannot do anything, because the code generators still generating code, you want to follow them...

Solution:
make your framework, your tests from the very first time as they are mission critical applications. Because they are. You cannot be negligent, the execution and the report coming out of your tests will be the most important thing for your team (if not, do not do it at all).