5 ms·

> This sounds soul-crushing and I hope never to work in such an environment. It isn't. Soul-crushing is doing "Agile" where the "scrum master" tells you how l

by porker 5y ago

> This sounds soul-crushing and I hope never to work in such an environment. It isn't. Soul-crushing is doing "Agile" where the "scrum master" tells you how long each ticket will take, where the client is invisible and never involved, and where retro is 1 hour at the end of the sprint and focused on blame.

chris11 5y ago
That example does sound really bad. But I would feel disengaged if everything was broken down to 1 point stories at the beginning of the sprint.
- antihipocrat 5y ago
  I thought the idea was to focus on what is achievable in the sprint. Breaking tasks into separate steps or points exposes the complexity of a task and a task that is listed as 1 point should be fairly quick to implement. For me I'd feel more engaged by seeing that I've contributed to completing distinct points on the board at the end of the sprint. I'm a team of one and only recently started coding a large project. Sometimes I can work entire days only having achieved intangible progress. I'd love to be able to quantify this work as progress toward distinct tasks. Maybe I need to implement an Agile-like system for myself.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
The "scrum master" is not telling you how long a ticket will take. They're asking you, can you break this ticket down any further? I see that you have a task to implement validation in the phone number field, can we break that down into three tasks? Determining the format which needs to be applied and edge cases, adding validation to the field on the client side, and also on the server side? Right away, thinking about it this way may reveal certain unknowns which you had not previously thought about. And all of it took an extra minute or two. While your team-mates are also engaged and "THERE" to help. Later you can see which of the tasks took longer or less than expected, and use this to improve your future estimates (during the retro.) This is only skimming the top of the types of benefits you can gain from a good Agile process.
- porker 5y ago
  No, in this case the "scrum master" did tell us how long the tickets would take, because the cost had already been agreed with the client before we were involved. It was a special place to work.

by porker 5y ago

chris11 5y ago

That example does sound really bad. But I would feel disengaged if everything was broken down to 1 point stories at the beginning of the sprint.

antihipocrat 5y ago
I thought the idea was to focus on what is achievable in the sprint. Breaking tasks into separate steps or points exposes the complexity of a task and a task that is listed as 1 point should be fairly quick to implement. For me I'd feel more engaged by seeing that I've contributed to completing distinct points on the board at the end of the sprint. I'm a team of one and only recently started coding a large project. Sometimes I can work entire days only having achieved intangible progress. I'd love to be able to quantify this work as progress toward distinct tasks. Maybe I need to implement an Agile-like system for myself.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

The "scrum master" is not telling you how long a ticket will take. They're asking you, can you break this ticket down any further? I see that you have a task to implement validation in the phone number field, can we break that down into three tasks? Determining the format which needs to be applied and edge cases, adding validation to the field on the client side, and also on the server side? Right away, thinking about it this way may reveal certain unknowns which you had not previously thought about. And all of it took an extra minute or two. While your team-mates are also engaged and "THERE" to help. Later you can see which of the tasks took longer or less than expected, and use this to improve your future estimates (during the retro.) This is only skimming the top of the types of benefits you can gain from a good Agile process.

porker 5y ago
No, in this case the "scrum master" did tell us how long the tickets would take, because the cost had already been agreed with the client before we were involved. It was a special place to work.