WhatsApp deliberately ignored all heavyweight processes
Note: Scrum should not be heavyweight
how people work even without a process,
Note: They don’t usually work well in my experience
Teams struggling often had little to do with the methodologies. People mentioned lack of vision, good engineers leaving, lack of transparency or poor tooling as reasons why things went badly. For these teams, no change of methodology would help because the issues ran deeper.
Note: Actually some of these things are, in fact, related to methodologies or are easier to debug with certain methodologies.
Requirements changing, even with dedicated project managers, sits poorly with engineers.
Note: Life doesn’t sit well with engineers very often
Many teams go with an RFC-like planning process, iterate on building, and ship all within a few weeks.
We soon moved to a more fluid way of working, taking the Kanban approach. We stopped caring about sprints, and dropped most rituals that come with Scrum. We just cared about knowing what we’re working on now, and what it was we’d get done next.
When talking to engineers at Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, Netflix and similar organizations, most of them have never used Scrum. Why? It’s because of a few things: * Competent, autonomous people need less structure to produce reliable, high-quality output. Big Tech is able to attract, afford and hire these people.
Note: When you have good people, everything works
A few situations where Scrum can be a good alternative: 1. “Kitchen sink teams” which have everything thrown at them, them. My approach to project management has been to coach and mentor members of my team to become project leads themselves.
First-class developer tooling is a given in these places,
When talking to engineers at Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, Netflix and similar organizations, most of them have never used Scrum. Why? It’s because of a few things:
Competent, autonomous people need less structure to produce reliable, high-quality output. Big Tech is able to attract, afford and hire these people.
Note: The key of it all: with good people, everything works
“Kitchen sink teams” are typical within non-tech companies, where the business has no understanding of how engineering works. Scrum helps rein in the stakeholders and educates them on software development processes, while giving the engineering team breathing room to execute. They are also common in early-stage startups, where there is one engineering team to build everything.