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Agile shouldn't make developers more replaceable, but in my experience that's the effect of Scrum when wielded by many kinds of management. Stuff like "story po
by eropple 7y ago
Agile shouldn't make developers more replaceable, but in my experience that's the effect of Scrum when wielded by many kinds of management. Stuff like "story points" rigged such that a problem that would take a week must be reduced to smaller--preferably parallelizable--micro-stories that have implicit context but no explicit dependencies so that the decision of farming it out to many juniors can be upheld.
I'm not saying that this actually works better, to be clear. But I would bet it works cheaper for the time horizons that the folks making those decisions care about.
- Chyzwar 7y agoSplitting the store into smaller tasks is better. It forces you to plan and communicate your progress. It allows for adjustments in both requirements and estimation. In many business cases, this approach is better. The senior developer should outperform multiple juniors anyway, in most cases, it is seniors that carry progress. Toxic companies will twist a good process and make it horrible. It is not Agile or Scrum to blame.
- eropple 7y agoSplitting things is not inherently bad. Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is not inherently bad. Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is definitely bad for developers' careers.
- Chyzwar 7y agoIf you care more about career than team success, project delivery and skills progression you are already in a sad place. "Commodify of application" is a good thing. This means that your team is flexible and can adapt to changes. It mean that there little of key person dependencies. It makes you go for holidays without worrying that your team will be able to finish a new service because you are one of two people that can navigate AWS :P