Is the development process at Uber more like watered down waterfall disguised as agile? I hear its common to spec and design a project for weeks or months at a time before starting to work on it. Thats just waterfall with more meetings lol. How is the pace of development compared to startups?
Not sure about how it is now, but about a year and half ago that was not the case. Uber was hands down the most agile and fast moving company I have experienced. Their current troubles seem to suggest they regressed into what you’re pointing towards.
if you take a month specing a project, you will get fired. uber has 30k employees, and is no startup by any means. it is not microsoft either. not yet.
It slowed down a bit but it’s still a lot faster than Apple.
Uber is a machine. Used to be faster but until today our motto is "let's move fwd". No politics. No BS.
Fast for its size
Nothing wrong with that.
What is scrum if not 2 week waterfall? 😎😝 Mgmt be like what took 3 months before, do it in 2 weeks. 🤑 I want leadership teams and head honchos to do scrum. Let’s see how many of them complete their stories in time. And give correct estimates.
Scrum should really be about iteration based on feedback loops. But this is rarely practiced. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a sprint review that had actual feedback from stakeholders. One of the byproducts of scrum is that you will ship faster obviously. If you tell developers to ship stuff every two weeks, that is what they’ll do. Ready or not, here the crap comes.
Agreed. I was being a bit sarcastic - if you see Dave Thomas’s Agile is dead talk, that captures accurately how a methodology by developers morphed into something very different. The absolutely nauseating example of that is https://www.scaledagileframework.com
Every team chooses their own methodology so there is no ‘one way’ across the company. That said what you probably heard about is the ERD process, which is writing a spec doc in a week or two and having it reviewed for 1-2 weeks by all other mobile/backend/frontend devs to make sure you’re not going to screw up other teams work inadvertently. Otherwise my team is weekly sprints, stand ups when we need them, retros and all that other agile jazz. The company is very process light from my experience, notwithstanding the ERD process which we ripped from google’s RFC process.
Thanks. That was probably it. When does this ERD process come into play? Every new project regardless of dependencies on other teams? Major features that integrate with various services owned by more than one team? Having a whole process for something as simple as syncing up on an api seems weird.
If you’re working on a cross team or cross org project, your ERD will be level 2 which requires a reviewer from each team and if core functionality, a committee. If your feature only affects your team, level 3 is sufficient which means your manager basically just stamps it. Level 1 is for a new company business line, or new app, or something huge, and requires C-level approval but almost never happens in practice. My team has experimented with doing away with ERDs entirely, but it usually ends up leading to lots of fuck ups and disagreements later on, more so than it helps.
No it's the gig economy process.