4 ms·

With Agile, I find more ceremonies than actually work - Planning, estimations, Re-Planning, Cross Prioritization, Retro, Ticket Updates, Blockers, Blah, blah...

• BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Our daily "15-minute" stand ups regularly tip over to 30+ minutes. This should be a sign that the team needs to be split up, as more than half of the stand-up is discussion of topics that are totally unrelated to my context. It stops my momentum, annoys me, which ruins my motivation.
  • rexpop 4y ago
    So... why do you put up with it?
    • BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      12 month fixed term contract, which is up in a couple of weeks. ;)
  • chii 4y ago
    > more than half of the stand-up is discussion of topics that are totally unrelated to my context. or the team is doing too much at a time, and delegating different "projects" to different people in the name of efficiency. I think that's actually wrong - the whole team should work on the "same" task. For example, coding a module could be done together. It might seem like only 1 person is writing code, and everyone else is over the shoulder looking, but you save knowledge transfer times in the future, and you save code review time (you do review at the same time when everyone is there).
  • deckard1 4y ago
    I had a manager that gave me shit for not being verbose enough. And our stand-ups were already in that 20+ minute territory. Why do we have a Jira board if no one wants to read it? It's all right there! No blockers. Next.
  • throwaway787544 4y ago
    I stopped going to stand-up and simply posted a Slack thread for status. The people who didn't like it are the people who would ramble on at stand-up, uncomfortable being curt or ending a meeting early. They'd ask "anyone have anything else to talk about?" just to fill up extra time. No preparation ahead of time, so a lot of "oh yeah and also..."
• yomkippur 4y ago
  Don't forget that it wastes team's energy before, during and after. We would have 3~4 hour estimations & planning and it would just completely wipe everybody out. On top of that we had to track time to the minute and were thrown into debt because we owed "extra hours". On top of this our estimation would always be off due to people being burnt out and it would mean more hours were owed. This was a salaried position in Canada btw a long time ago and I don't know why there is so many of these small nanny startups that think they own people because they pay them a salary.
  • watwut 4y ago
    These used to wipe me out, but ever since I stopped paying attention to them this issue got solved. I use them for exercising, cooking, reading HN, etc while half listening to it like it would be radio. And literally nothing was lost in the process. I am as productive as before, know as little about product we are developing as before.
    • yomkippur 4y ago
      really? being on conference call for 3 hour straight, talking, thinking doesn't tire you out? the whole team takes breaks between and after too. even then I feel tired from such a lengthy session.
      • watwut 4y ago
        > being on conference call for 3 hour straight, talking, thinking doesn't tire you out Being there straight, talking, thinking and listening would tire me out. But, I only half listen, dont focus on parts that dont seem relevant and get rest as I please. These meetings were super tiring for me when I was trying to learn requirements from them. But the result was that I did not learned much anyway and not paying attention made no change.
    • rightbyte 4y ago
      Ye crowded useless meetings you don't pull are a breeze if you are WFH.