Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> As I mentioned before, sprint planning meetings are unproductive because they lead to “designing by committee” and focus on getting estimations right, which is not only a waste of time, but also impossible to do in a stochastic process such as software development.

This sentence alone reveals an incorrect understanding of scrum.

First, scrum does not "focus on getting estimations right". In fact, if you search through the scrum guide [0], you will not find any mention of estimates whatsoever.

Second, the purpose of a planning meeting is to identify what next to work on in order to add the most value to the product. Therefore, the meeting involves the product owner, who has the clearest understanding of the business value of the product at any given point, and the developers, who have the clearest understanding of what's going underneath the hood of the product. Their conversation informs both the developers of what's most valuable, and the product owner of what's doable.

Third, in the planning meeting developers, who are actually going to be doing the work, have an opportunity to decide how they are going to split the work, how they are going to collaborate on it, and whether there are any unsolved dependencies preventing them from taking the work into the next iteration.

How this can be dismissed as a waste of time is beyond me.

[0] - https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html



What you say is completely true for a spherical team floating in a frictionless void.

The reality is that it is quite difficult to break products down into separate features then work on those features separately and in order.

Because of this, it's very easy for planning meetings to accidentally become "What did we work on last week? Will this still be done on time?"


So. The article is comparing Kanban done right with Scrum done wrong. That doesn't seem fair.


> How this can be dismissed as a waste of time is beyond me.

I think a lot of it is because Scrum as practiced is often not like you describe.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: