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Agreed. There is something nice about seeing the project chug along as the seasons change, as opposed to the infinite two-week “sprint”

by zwkrt 5y ago

musicale 5y ago
Sprint is an extremely unfortunate term. Do people really think that "agile" somehow magically enables employees to work at an accelerated pace for two or three weeks without exhaustion, downtime, or any negative side effects, and then turn around and do it again, indefinitely?
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Exactly it should be something like marathon with 2 week splits. The fact that management loves the term "sprint" tells you something about the motivations of management-induced agile: artificial urgency.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  > Do people really think that "agile" somehow magically enables employees to work at an accelerated pace for two or three weeks without exhaustion, downtime, or any negative side effects, and then turn around and do it again, indefinitely? Yes, they're called management, and all A/agile is an excuse for them to engage in micromanagement under a different name. "We're not _micromanaging_, we're iterating!"
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    Agile is a disciplinary practice that asks human beings to constitute themselves as policing/policed subjects of a distributed, decentralized gaze. You know you've won when you can get a team to argue with itself about not reaching zero on the burndown chart at the sprint review every two weeks regardless of context; sprint retros that must have items that went well/wrong/actionable as "nothing" (which is what a sprint really is) is unacceptable (at least where I've worked); "you mean nothing went well?!?!? Nothing went wrong?!?". But more, I feel like the majority of expressions of power in my life, across domains, have been manifested themselves as "work on your self", for which we are all infinitely guilty of, even though the various articles of work are not your own and never belonged to you. I once knew someone who would manipulate people by first getting them to avow to some value/principle statement, however general, then claiming that what they wanted you to do to be a tool to fulfilling that value statement that you just avowed to, no matter how indirect the actual relationship between those things, such that you were contradicting your own avowed values if you failed to comply. Gaslighting in the first degree, but I see some variant of this tactic in other domains, wherein the source of power assertion is, in the first step made anonymous ("I'm just asking questions"), then, in the second step, made out to be your own guiltiness ("you're shutting out intellectual skepticism and debate!")
    - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
      Ahhh, the burndown chart, the weird whip cracking behind our back. If after a sprint it's not zero, we have to put on a whole floor show about why that happened, if it's zero before the sprint ends, everyone gets a single pat on the back and the next sprint will be loaded with more story points. It's such a clownshow.

Agreed. There is something nice about seeing the project chug along as the seasons change, as opposed to the infinite two-week “sprint”

by zwkrt 5y ago

Agreed. There is something nice about seeing the project chug along as the seasons change, as opposed to the infinite two-week “sprint”

musicale 5y ago

Sprint is an extremely unfortunate term. Do people really think that "agile" somehow magically enables employees to work at an accelerated pace for two or three weeks without exhaustion, downtime, or any negative side effects, and then turn around and do it again, indefinitely?

steveBK123 5y ago
Exactly it should be something like marathon with 2 week splits. The fact that management loves the term "sprint" tells you something about the motivations of management-induced agile: artificial urgency.
phone8675309 5y ago
> Do people really think that "agile" somehow magically enables employees to work at an accelerated pace for two or three weeks without exhaustion, downtime, or any negative side effects, and then turn around and do it again, indefinitely? Yes, they're called management, and all A/agile is an excuse for them to engage in micromanagement under a different name. "We're not _micromanaging_, we're iterating!"
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Agile is a disciplinary practice that asks human beings to constitute themselves as policing/policed subjects of a distributed, decentralized gaze. You know you've won when you can get a team to argue with itself about not reaching zero on the burndown chart at the sprint review every two weeks regardless of context; sprint retros that must have items that went well/wrong/actionable as "nothing" (which is what a sprint really is) is unacceptable (at least where I've worked); "you mean nothing went well?!?!? Nothing went wrong?!?". But more, I feel like the majority of expressions of power in my life, across domains, have been manifested themselves as "work on your self", for which we are all infinitely guilty of, even though the various articles of work are not your own and never belonged to you. I once knew someone who would manipulate people by first getting them to avow to some value/principle statement, however general, then claiming that what they wanted you to do to be a tool to fulfilling that value statement that you just avowed to, no matter how indirect the actual relationship between those things, such that you were contradicting your own avowed values if you failed to comply. Gaslighting in the first degree, but I see some variant of this tactic in other domains, wherein the source of power assertion is, in the first step made anonymous ("I'm just asking questions"), then, in the second step, made out to be your own guiltiness ("you're shutting out intellectual skepticism and debate!")
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    Ahhh, the burndown chart, the weird whip cracking behind our back. If after a sprint it's not zero, we have to put on a whole floor show about why that happened, if it's zero before the sprint ends, everyone gets a single pat on the back and the next sprint will be loaded with more story points. It's such a clownshow.