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Yes, people like predictable. Tell management every project will take a month, and meet that expectation, then management will be happy. While someone else wh
by melling 4y ago
Yes, people like predictable.
Tell management every project will take a month, and meet that expectation, then management will be happy.
While someone else who takes the same work and says it’ll take one week then is consistently 2 days late will be viewed as less effective.
So, by squeezing people into a guaranteed timeframe, in a mini death march aka sprint, you are forcing people to make [very] conservative estimates.
For larger companies this might be preferred, but I would argue, smaller companies should try to move faster.
- roflyear 4y agoThe issue is management rarely is looking 1-2 months out. They are looking 1-2 years out. On those scales it is impossible to estimate anything. "Oh, yeah, the rewrite will be done in 1yr, no worries" One year passes, and you haven't started!
- tstrimple 4y agoI wish it was the norm for management to be looking 1-2 years out. Sometimes that tries to happen at the C level, but even then it doesn't seem to work its way down to line managers who are almost always focused on the next immediate deliverable. Future looking managers are the exception, not the rule in my experience.
- roflyear 4y agoI'm not saying it is good forward-looking. Can be bad.
- agumonkey 4y agoThis is a strange law of human groups. Only caring about negative slip. That's why everybody inflates everything to shield themselves from the backlash.
- TuringTest 4y agoThat's a good reason why sprints work well so often. They limit the amount of inflation that is possible.
- agumonkey 4y agoI think sprints (I've almost never used this in work and am not anti) are lacking something, limiting scope is one thing but do they ensure framing the problem / solution / design well too ? The few times we've used sprints it was just issue dispatch and see you later, not really a guarantee of anything, but maybe I'm missing some information.
- TuringTest 4y ago> do they ensure framing the problem / solution / design well too ? In my experience with a complex product, they do not. You need an earlier, separate layer of preparation for defining and refining implementation tasks until they are ready to be scheduled in a sprint. Although in the ideal workflow, you should be able to split those definition processes (user research, writing requirements, etc) as tasks for the team members involved, so their output can be included themselves as deliverables in previous sprints, so that later ones use those completed definition tasks as input.
- agumonkey 4y agoThanks a lot.
- willcipriano 4y agoMy read of this is agile is primarily attempting to maintain the emotional state of the management team.
- scotty79 4y ago> you are forcing people to make [very] conservative estimates My experience is that once developers make conservative estimates they are ignored because business side of things would rather prefer to imagine they'll get the system completed this decade, not when estimates show. So instead of working according to estimates everybody is crunching and cutting corners and project gets delivered in some useful form in less than a year.