The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog. Ie, sprints don’t have to be replaced with anything since there are no benefits.
If you keep your product backlog groomed, your team can use Kanban and always be working on the top priority. Sprints add overhead to create a separate backlog that, in my experience, seems to roll over sprint to sprint.
The benefits usually amount to “it’s not waterfall” - a line which really hasn’t been relevant in decades.
I get the sense most managers stick to scrum and all the unnecessary overhead mainly because they are creatures of habit. Pushing a non-scrum system in an organization that fully embraces it is hard (especially when senior leaders enjoy the micromanaging aspects of it).
The benefit is a social one of being able to tell "stakeholders" that their shit's getting bumped to the next sprint if they keep trying to toss extra junk on the pile this sprint. The time cut-off is helpful for keeping jackasses up the org chart at bay, when it's done correctly and you're actually allowed to say things like that, and follow through. The chunked time makes it easier to justify a larger time-cost to monkeying with the short-term schedule, which makes stakeholders be more considerate.
That's in the unicorn-rare case that you're in an org that can do "agile" right, but still has the problem of clueless stakeholders shitting everywhere and no discipline or expectation that PMs are empowered to tell them (politely) to fuck off without the support of this kind of framework. Otherwise, yeah, they're not that useful. You can track velocity and such without them, so that's not a good reason to have them.
I’ve been on the stakeholder side in similar situations. Rather than saying that they were very busy and that it can take a while to get my task done, they strung me along (“we’ll take it up in next sprint planning”, “oh we missed your task, but it might be added to next sprint”, etc). Granted, this is an anecdote, but if a team can only plan a couple of weeks ahead, how should stakeholders be able to plan?
Sure, I hope I made it clear that in general I don't think sprints are especially useful. They can truly be useful in the specific, narrow case of organizations that have independent, well-run teams but also inept or inexperienced-with-software-development stakeholders who've got a dysfunctional relationship with those same teams, and when for some reason that problem can't be addressed directly rather than relying on sprints as a boundary-setting and communication tool. Probably this combination most often happens in-the-wild when the developers and the stakeholders aren't even in the same organization, in fact (think: development agencies).
The dysfunction can certainly go the other way (the stakeholders are competent and reasonable, but the teams are broken) in which case I'd not expect sprints to be helpful, and possibly abusable in the ways you suggest.
> if a team can only plan a couple of weeks ahead, how should stakeholders be able to plan?
When it's done right (ha, ha, ha) there absolutely is long-term planning, but adjustment of priorities sprint-to-sprint (which should be happening due to stakeholders and product managers and such making decisions, since they set those priorities) can affect that—the flux in long-term planning should be a reflection of the reality of choices made sprint to sprint that differ from the original plan, not due to a lack of planning, so that no-one's surprised when the mark that's hit in six months differs—for the good reason that the direction of the project was modified in-flight—from the one that was originally targeted. The entire point of sprints is to allow flexibility without day-to-day thrashing, while also capturing the effects of each sprint's work on that longer-term planning to avoid big surprises farther into the project.
Again, that's all if it's done correctly, and if the situation even warrants using sprints in the first place. Which, every now and then all that's true, but I'd not say it's the norm. I don't think most orgs even think very hard about what the point of having sprints is, before imposing them.
How do you deal with errors? Do you check them at every callsite and manually “bubble up”, or do you use exceptions?
I’d love to use coroutines but we don’t use exceptions and I’m not super excited about handling errors manually.
I learned C++ in the early 90ies, but didn't like it much; I needed to do plain C for a few years at dayjob and several open source projects until I was fed up with manual error handling and go back to C++. At first with a "-fno-exceptions" policy (using something similar to GLib's GError), but gave up my resistance after a few more years, and now I enjoy exceptions very much. It's not perfect, nothing is, but everything else is uglier and so much more cumbersome.
Exceptions seem inappropriate with writing non-blocking/asynchronous code, because where do you throw stuff when the caller is not on the call stack, but instead wants you to invoke a completion callback... but on the other hand, I don't want to implement two different kinds of error reporting - just look at the C++ standard library, which sometimes throws exceptions, sometimes uses std::errc - no, I wanted one single way to wrap error conditions, and I decided that std::exception_ptr is the way to go. All my error callbacks take an std::exception_ptr parameter, which they can then rethrow eventually, or pass on to the next error callback. Yes, I hate std::exception_ptr because it allocates memory on the heap, I despise implicit dynamic allocations, but everything else is uglier and so much more cumbersome. (I repeat myself.)
Error handling is dirty, no matter how you solve it, but C++ exceptions, with all their disadvantages, allow me to just consider the problem solved and go on with writing real code instead of keeping worrying everywhere. It just works.
I know many projects and corporations have a strict "-fno-exceptions" policy and will not change their minds like I did - that's a matter of personal taste.
Also people in the 60s lived through a nuke (1945) and lived through WW2. That living memory is now gone.
The problem with the "anti-war" crowd right now, is many appear to be closet Putin supporters. Or at least they're so anti-American that they support Putin by default. It would help the anti-war people not in that camp to carefully disambiguate between wanting to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict -- a laudable goal -- and support for Putin's imperial aggression.
This is the eternal paradox of being anti-war: if you are advocating peace in a polarized situation you are essentially aiding and abetting the enemy. The anti-war movement really only has one window of opportunity: in a non- or low-polarized situation create strong trade ties, international agreements and intercultural understanding and hope that it can fetter the always active belligerents on all sides to a sufficient degree. When the polarization reaches a certain level (sufficient number of people killed or maimed on both sides and the killing frenzy rhetoric has taken hold) all we can do is go silent and watch as the world goes down in flames.
The most realistic hope is likely that there is a new window of opportunity to build on thereafter when the horrific memories of war are still live in memory.
But there is of course always a desperate, albeit likely unrealistic hope that people in charge will come to their senses before it is too late.
> This is the eternal paradox of being anti-war: if you are advocating peace in a polarized situation you are essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.
There is no such paradox. True patriots simply do not want their beloved countries to bloody their hands with the murder of foreign people. Not to mention with the total annihilation of the entire human race.
Of course those who are opposed to the war should protest. "People in charge" don't just come to their senses. Democratic societies especially have mechanisms in place to ensure that there's no need to wait for anyone to come to their senses. If elected leaders are abusing their power to murder and destroy, those elected leaders can be replaced, legally and democratically and without much fuss. That there is fuss is only the result of those people clinging to power and not wanting to let go. But the rest of us should fight to take power away from their hands. We should not let mad, bloodthirsty assholes keep power.
If you don't want your country to go to war, if you don't want your country to bomb foreign people, if you don't want your country to use its "nuclear deterrent" to start, or compound, a nuclear holocaust, then protest. Protest as if it was a very important thing, because it is a very damned important thing.
And btw, this applies to Russians also. You're forgetting, in your "paradox", that a Russian anti-war movement exists and that its people protest and don't give a dime about "paradoxes". And they're not even citizens of a democratic country that makes special space for such protests in its legislation. They're persecuted and beaten up and put into jail. But they protest because there is no other way.
Good thing you added that thing about snark to your previous comment because the irony was not altogether evident.
I totally agree, people should protest. But they don't, exactly because of the age-old paradox mentioned, that you so emphatically deny. You underestimate the societal, psychological mechanisms in place, you underestimate the power of propaganda given to the military, even in democratic countries when "national security" is at stake, you underestimate the belief among large swathes of the population that "we can win this thing" and get rich doing it.
Of course I hope you are right, I'd love to be proven wrong. You are likely young and want to live a long and healthy life. I am old and with one foot in the grave anyway. But I do believe it gives me some clarity of vision, unobscured by wishful thinking.
I think I am. If you see what's happening in Iran right now, it's clear that people don't always coldly calculate their chances to win and there is a threshold beyond which common decency and ambient morality will boil over to rage that overwhelms the instinct of self-preservation.
In the case of nuclear weapons on the other hand, it is about self-preservation because the blood-thirstiness and the willingness to take risks of the people who control nuclear weapons can doom us all to non-existence. Or, even worse, to a nightmare existence were we are worse than beasts in a world destroyed and incapable of sustaining life.
A large part of the peace movement in e.g. West Germany in the 1980s was "anti-American" but not "pro-Soviet-Union".
Not everything is a binary choice, and it gets tiresome to prefix every Internet comment with a whole paragraph of disclaimers.
The "anti-war" crowd questions the Western provocations and meddling since the orange revolutions by Nuland etc. It questions the erasure of history since at least 1995.
Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate, is certainly not a Putin supporter. Yet he is depicted as one by large parts of the Internet mob, who always have the correct flag selections in their Twitter "biographies".
> The "anti-war" crowd questions the Western provocations and meddling since the orange revolutions by Nuland etc. It questions the erasure of history since at least 1995.
People who repeat false Kremlin war justification propaganda are being tacitly pro-war. It's double speak to call this behavior anti-war. These are the people I was talking about.
Nuland discussing in a leaked call who should replace Yanukovych and mentioning the one person who was overwhelmingly favored by polls of Ukrainians just prior to Yanukovych's ousting, and would have won an election in a landslide, is not meddling. Her meeting with him, in view of public cameras, isn't meddling. Ukrainian politicans are allowed to meet officials from other countries.
That is not an accurate description of the Nuland-Pyatt call. They are not merely "discussing who should replace Yanukovych." They are talking about actively putting together a new government, and discussing the fact that they have to move quickly, before the Russians can get involved or the EU can object.
If you were against the Iraq War then you could demonstrate in D.C. If you are against a Russian invasion as an American you can’t protest next to the Kremlin. You have to protest against aiding arms (not necessarily humanitarian aid), which might look like “aiding Putin”.
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
Yes, this is a very well known problem. Even in the '60s most of the people who were, for example, against the Vietnam war, were closet Stalin supporters, commies and reds under the beds. They were dirty hippies with long hair that smoked weed and were good for nothing but protesting against the war.
Even in Russia, all the people who protest the war are US supporters. It's incredible how much hate of one's own nation is the real cause underlying all those protests that are ostensibly for peace. It's as if people can't see the benefits of war for their own nation.
(yes, this comment is breaking the guideline against snark).
What important piece of the puzzle are western media omitting that makes this not a war between Russia and Ukraine? What is the whole truth, according to you? Ironically, you're the one omitting right now.
I can only recommend doing your own research, cross language barrier, examine the situation from as many points as possible, we have all the tools to do this. I do not feel comfortable here anymore to discuss this because of downvotes.
I would the say the opposite is true, the western media is more than happy to discuss and (over) analyse every little detail of information that quite freely flows into our media machines from many different sources.
We agonize over failures and freely discuss tactics and events, report explicitly and react to horrors occurring, sometimes so much that we get a bit desensitized over time.
It could be argued that we sometimes omit too little. Unlike in Russia now where telling the truth can get you a criminal record and land you in jail.
Ukrainians in occupied territories seem to get murdered, tortured and raped. So yeah I think it’s fair to say they’d be better off without the Russians.
Now that the Ukrainians are taking back territories I fully expect the purging related stories to be on their way and it’s not going to look pretty as usual. Wars are disgusting affairs.
You can’t base your analysis on the reported exactions committed by one side. That’s just setting you as an easy target for propaganda.
1. You're contradicting yourself: in your third point, you say that I shouldn't trust that civilians are getting murdered, raped and tortured. But in your first point, you say that I should be expecting such behavior.
2. I'd expect there to not be a war to begin with. Russia 100% controls this, and can stop whenever they want.
3. War doesn't have to be done in the most brutal way possible.
4. "the purging related stories to be on their way and it’s not going to look pretty as usual" I don't understand what this means.
I'm getting very strong pro-Russian vibes from your comments. Not going to reply anymore -- real people are dying.
I never said that you shouldn’t trust that civilians are being raped, tortured and murdered. They most definitely are. That’s the reality of war. It’s always brutal. There is no such thing as a clean war.
I said focusing on that makes you analysing conflicts poorly and expose you to be manipulated. I am most definitely not pro-Russian. I am very much pro the interests of my own country first however.
