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ELI5: In software engineering, what is a Scrum, and what useful purpose does it serve?
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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I think the simplest description is like playing among us and just being able to focus on your tasks for the round. The tasks get done and the goal is achieved. There's someone there who should stop the imposter from getting to you.
The not quite an ELI5 answer:
It's a small team of people focused on solving a problem. It is primarily used by people working in tech and with agile methodology.
When it's done right and works it's like the a team
Scrum in itself is just a framework of work process. Designed to maximise the result of the work put in for a short period of work. No distractions, no interruptions. Just setting an achievable goal and committing to it. This works really well in agile environments, as it's focused on short term goals.
These are buzzwords and are often mentioned without understanding or adherence. It's difficult stay true to these in the real world.
There are people in the team whose job it is to keep all distractions away from those working towards the goal. As that just impedes it.
The scrum guide is pretty brief and concise if you want further reading.
Wow, my brain does not work like that. I read so many individual words that have meaning for me but with so little overall comprehension. I don't think I could be a programmer. It sounds like disorganised chaos and perpetual firefighting where there's no overall plan and no one knows what their role really is. It seems so opposite to the stereotypes about programmers. I strongly suspect that's not what it means and I just failed to understand but for just now I find it fairly strongly incomprehensible that that's how you would deliberately try to run things.
Its more a human thing: you have a big thing many people are working together to build, you have to organize somehow and make sure the thing actually is being built and does what it needs to do. Good companies do have an overall plan and good communication.
SCRUM is just one of many ways of organizing a project. It in itself isn't really a programming thing even if it is most often used there, the general structure can work for just about every project that can be split in to multiple smaller tasks and sub-projects.
If your programming team is perpetual firefighting and chaos with nobody knowing their roles then that's a sign of a bad organization or a lousy management structure. The last company I worked at was very organized. Status meetings thrice a week, clear seperation of responsibility, a good team lead divying up tasks the cropped up, and good communication between programmers.
Well that's a relief. Thanks for explaining.
It's nearly impossible to plan. Sometimes a very difficult thing is done in minutes and then you want to add a simple button to the gui and it can take days in the worst case.
One time I had to add some kind of grayscale effect to a gui. Well, it was not supported by the gui system. So of course the boss told me to put it in there any way. It ended up taking days.
In the end it wasn't even shipped! At least if it was open source I could have shared the work. So ya, it can be super frustrating. Especially if crunching is expected because your boss thinks its your responsibility.
It sounds like one simple idea meant changing things everywhere!
It can be like that. And hopefully you have a boss that has experience coding. But unfortunately that's not the case all the time.