- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Guess i got a blackout bingo on this one. Oof.
"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn’t select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you’ll have to start this whole process over.
Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"
Let’s not forget “We need this right away!” then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren’t actually ready for it yet (if they don’t change their mind and decide they don’t actually want it at all).
It’s actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says “Well, it’s a simple task. Are you having difficulty?”.
It’s an obscure and weirdly specific law.
(This is a joke, of course.)
I have spent the past 20 years cultivating a variety of tones in which to utter my standard reply to such nonsense:
“Cool. You do it then.”
That’s a great way to handle it.
I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.
When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.
If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)
I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.
One of these is wage theft. Don’t enable that shit.
Yup. Not getting paid? Don’t work.
Forced to? We have a word for someone who is forced to work for no compensation… The word is slipping my mind, but I’m pretty sure the USA fought a civil war about it.
I just had a contractor tell me I needed to prioritize their request because it’s urgent for the task they’re working on that’s adding a new feature.
they want me to push the changes out by EOD…today…Friday.
I don’t like to do this, but I hold seniority…sooo…I think I’m going to take a three hour long lunch and cut out for the weekend early.
don’t come to me with a request unless it’s actually urgent.
The “Story Points = Hours” hits so goddamn hard. Like, tell me you don’t fucking understand scrum without telling me you don’t understand scrum.
We had a nice, effective production process on my team until a middle manager assigned to communicate with us started in with the whole “We can’t spare this many points” bullshit.
If story points are now hours, I hope you’re fine with me putting a 40 on that ticket.
Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
Sources:
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work
They worked well for us
Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.
After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.
The outcomes weren’t noticably different, so now we just don’t spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.
My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn’t want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.
So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.
Somewhat agree, but since Scrum is supposed to be bent to the team’s needs, it might differ from team to team, but it’s fine as long as those numbers are consistently used in one team.
Does 5 time trackers count as 5 points ?
4 hour planning
I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.
“Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter”
Story points = hours
So what’s the actual error margin for estimating feature implementation time? It’s going to be nearly the whole thing, right?
The estimate is not a promise, it’s a guess. I prefer to estimate in sprints because that’s about the resolution we can have confidence in, but management want hours so my process is to estimate the number of hours in a sprint (73.5 for us) plus one sprint
200% overruns are common, especially when requirements change significantly
Wildly depends on the complexity of the feature. If it only takes 4 hours to implement, you might have good enough of an idea what needs to be done that you can estimate it with 1-hour-precision. That is, if you’re only doing things that you’ve done in a similar form before.
If the feature takes two weeks to implement, there’s so many steps involved in accomplishing that, that there’s a high chance for one of the steps to explode in complexity. Then you might be working on it for six weeks.
But yeah, I also double any estimate that I’m feeling, because reality shows that that ends up being more accurate, since I likely won’t have all complexity in mind, so in some sense my baseline assumed error is already 100%.
Hmm, so kinda O(n1.5) scaling? (Of the ratio between definitely required time and possibly required time, anyway, since a -110% error wouldn’t make sense)
Really not sure an estimate for algorithmic complexity is the right way to specify this. 😅
But if your supposed input unit is days, then I guess, yeah, that kind of works out.
All-day “Sprint Grooming” meeting
Might as well put the whole Agile/Scrum crap on there while you’re at it…
Disagree. My company does it well and I think it helps productivity across the board. My last job called our process agile and it was really just water-scrum-fall. Which was horrible and we devs were all miserable.
My experience with it was not like that… resources were thin but decision makers were poor at managing and simply wanted to take in the buzz to make it seem like they were doing better than they actually were. They could’ve made another Office Space movie about us. Needless to say, it’s no surprising the CTO left and later on the top division chief left… all the while, management kept putting pressure on making sure we fulfilled the caveats of agile/scrum even though we didn’t have the bandwidth to do all of it. Documentation is important, sure, but when management makes everything a P1 just cuz they failed to see things though… well, don’t find the time to put everything down in the kanban… yada yada yada. No thanks
But, is that a problem with Agile or with your company? That’s my point.
