5 ms·

Agree. Also tickets being units of work that you can assign "effort" points to and measure "velocity" with is the biggest load of shit I've ever come across. I'

Agree. Also tickets being units of work that you can assign "effort" points to and measure "velocity" with is the biggest load of shit I've ever come across. I'm surprised any developers buy it. I've been told "oh no effort is not time" me : "but you always says what's that in days?" "No but we don't measure velocity like that" Me internally "oh fuck right off"

stephenhuey 5y ago
Scrum doesn’t have velocity and burn-down charts. Those are add-on Agile extras. Scrum is simple, but it’s so annoying how people make everything so complicated. When I start working on something, we may have an idea of how much effort it is, but often you dig into the code and find gnarly tangles, or the model has more gotchas than people realize and the person doing the work is the one person who has the entire model loaded into their head at the moment. Yes, a manager might need to verify people are actually working, but if the manager is capable it shouldn’t require burn-down charts which can be full of inaccuracies. It often takes actual thinking to get real work done and micromanagers hovering about do not help with producing thoughtful work. Scrum just says to get some help from friends when you need it, communicate about what could make your job better in the next few weeks, and are we breaking things down into bite-size pieces or do people have unrealistic expectations?
datavirtue 5y ago
We just had a talk from our master about how points are not days. Every developer ignored him and treated it as days because that was the signal. Management just made it official. Jira Align is rolled out and points are days. The master just threw up his hands and took his promotion under great duress. Before that the master really tried to have meaningful retros. Now we type some things in a doc, everyone is silent, and the master has dropped any mention of follow up or takeaways. ...and this is a company with a good culture! I have done this dance at places where the culture was not good. As a person renowned in my circle for technical ability and productivity this was the only place where I couldn't get anything done and was removed from the account by the manager. Relief.
jseban 5y ago
Yeah that semantic debate about what exactly the story points mean, is my least favorite recurring stupid conversation, right after that angry debate of what exactly constitutes a "true" unit test, lol

stephenhuey 5y ago

Scrum doesn’t have velocity and burn-down charts. Those are add-on Agile extras. Scrum is simple, but it’s so annoying how people make everything so complicated. When I start working on something, we may have an idea of how much effort it is, but often you dig into the code and find gnarly tangles, or the model has more gotchas than people realize and the person doing the work is the one person who has the entire model loaded into their head at the moment. Yes, a manager might need to verify people are actually working, but if the manager is capable it shouldn’t require burn-down charts which can be full of inaccuracies. It often takes actual thinking to get real work done and micromanagers hovering about do not help with producing thoughtful work. Scrum just says to get some help from friends when you need it, communicate about what could make your job better in the next few weeks, and are we breaking things down into bite-size pieces or do people have unrealistic expectations?

datavirtue 5y ago

We just had a talk from our master about how points are not days. Every developer ignored him and treated it as days because that was the signal. Management just made it official. Jira Align is rolled out and points are days. The master just threw up his hands and took his promotion under great duress. Before that the master really tried to have meaningful retros. Now we type some things in a doc, everyone is silent, and the master has dropped any mention of follow up or takeaways. ...and this is a company with a good culture! I have done this dance at places where the culture was not good. As a person renowned in my circle for technical ability and productivity this was the only place where I couldn't get anything done and was removed from the account by the manager. Relief.

jseban 5y ago

Yeah that semantic debate about what exactly the story points mean, is my least favorite recurring stupid conversation, right after that angry debate of what exactly constitutes a "true" unit test, lol