[ozmbie]

In my experience when people focus too much on sprint deadlines, they miss the purpose of sprints.

Timed sprints exist not for the benefits of managers, but for the benefit of developers. They exist so that the development team has a shield against managers making last-minute decisions and changing priorities without notice.

If the focus and discussion is regularly on short term deadlines, then the developers are not driving the process, the managers are. It means that sprints are seen as a management methodology and not a development methodology. And then everyone has a hard time.

Managers who think this way know they’re not “allowed” to make mid-sprint changes so instead they focus on the end/deadline.

The managers should be spending their energy supporting the team and figuring out what the priorities are for the next sprint(s). If they’re spending their mental energy on deadlines then they’re doing everyone involved a disservice.

[strictfp]

Sprints exist so that both management and devs can realize that there is more work than there is time. It forces devs to be focused and scope their work. It forces management to prioritize and scope down as well.

Keeping the deadline of the sprints is supposed to force management and devs to agree on reasonable scopes, such that the output of the dev team becomes predictable with time.

This enables devs to get trusted by management, breaking the poisonous relationship.

[wayoutthere]

Yeah, in my experience this is “boundary setting” — and it’s absolutely critical to a healthy dev culture.

When I was a baby manager, I focused hard on Agile process and deadlines / roadmap commitments. And you’re right; it completely ruined my relationship with my team. They saw me as a representative of the oppressive corporate overlords, which is totally fair because those were the people I was trying to impress.

It took a few failed projects for me to get it through my thick skull that “doing things right” meant protecting my team from this behavior pushed down from above. It meant giving them space to do the job we paid them for. I realized I was letting my anxieties overrule people who knew way more about the issue than I did. It meant listening more and pushing back on unreasonable requests.

And it turned out my boss didn’t care about missed deadlines for the most part — he cared way more about production incidents. The best way to reduce production incidents is to work deliberately and not take unnecessary risks. A side effect of this was that we had way more power to say “no” to other teams, which made maintaining the code base a lot easier.

[braythwayt]

+1

Sprints also have the pleasant effect of forcing some coherence onto work.

In the Old Days, teams might build software like a layer-cake: All the lowest layer, then the next layer, then the next, and so on to the top. So at the beginning, we’d be building infrastructure based on projections (a fancy word for “wild-ass guesses”) of what the subsequent layers would need.

You can, in theory, do that in sprints, but with an emphasis on delivering “working software,” sprints would help devs and stakeholders pick very small end-to-end increments and build whatever was needed to make them work.

This kept everyone focus on work that was known to be needed, and since you were building a complete increment, the team would be building the infrastructure at the same time it was designing and building the functionality relying on the infrastructure.

This kind of thing has its own failure modes, of course, but it eliminated a number of catastrophic project failure modes without even getting into the value of delivering working software sooner and revising priorities based on feedback.

[hrktb]

> This enables devs to get trusted by management

I am curious about that “trust” part. In your model what happens when management doesn’t trust devs ? do devs trust management ?

[PaulHoule]

If you can't manage 2 weeks of work, you can't manage 6 months worth.

[jake_morrison]

Scrum is for when you have a central dev team in a company that's shared between multiple groups. Once every sprint, you get all the managers in a room and let them fight it out. The result is a list of features that will be in the sprint. Everyone more or less gets their turn, depending on how powerful they are and whether something is legitimately urgent. Even if something is urgent, they can probably wait two weeks if they don't get it in this sprint. The dev team gets to work on something without interruptions for two weeks. The alternative is having everyone pushing around the devs, continuously changing requirements, overloaded devs, and general chaos.

[regularfry]

The critical factor there isn't the sprint, it's the product owner. As long as the PO has the power to prioritise work, and as long as they are the only gateway for getting work into the team, chaos (from this direction, anyway) is minimised.

[pjc50]

> If the focus and discussion is regularly on short term deadlines, then the developers are not driving the process, the managers are. It means that sprints are seen as a management methodology and not a development methodology. And then everyone has a hard time.

Right. This is the thing that's nearly impossible to achieve in most places and why so many people hate Agile: because they're dealing with "imposed agile" where the managers are driving the process.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Yep, the article argues that "locking sprints is a terrible process" because you're either going over or under the mark set upfront. As if those are the only options.

The idea of locking sprints was a reaction against the problem of going _sideways_ , i.e. "changing priorities without notice" and requests for unplanned work to be done "now" without any thought of the effects.

[mannykannot]

Sprints are one of the ways that management, with the help of a cadre of consultants, took control of agile while nominally endorsing it.

That is not to say that sprints do not serve a purpose -- several, in fact...

[gowld]

Sprint's don't have deadlines. That's the point of "agile". They have checkpoints.