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"Agile Signaling" Is Gaslighting the Tech Industry
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoWay too long of a video, honestly I'm not watching that guy. He makes me feel deeply depressed and despairing. I know what's wrong with the industry, but I still love making software. Just leave me be. == I recently said fuck it to points, and am trying to push this system: - 1 "point" is anything between 0.5 and 1 person-day of work - 2 is 1-2 person-days. etc... - 0.5 means "less than a few hours, from starting the task to merging the PR". Any ticket <1 point is not included in projections or estimates of "velocity" (which now should be close to 1 person-day * # team members, per day) This system allows us to do realistic projections, even if our estimates are totally off. How, might you ask, is that possible? Because if it takes a 3-person team 30 days to complete 45 points of work, then we know we're underestimating all our work by a factor of two. That's a super easy thing to address in retros. "Hey team, why is our work taking twice as long as we estimated? Great, let's account for that in the next cycle. Thanks. Retro over." No more dick-measuring contests between teams. No more asinine discussions about "story points" or my personal pet-peeve, Fibonacci points. As an industry that wants to be taken seriously by other engineers, we HAVE TO GET BETTER AT ESTIMATES. I don't care what the Mythical Man-Month says - software HAS to become more predictable to make. We HAVE TO find best practices, and know how to make software of a particular type, repeatably and consistently. We HAVE TO make use of statistics to estimate our work, like every other engineering discipline does. For an industry that supposedly came from a field that could be said is "applied math" at its core, we are absolutely, pathetically LOUSY at using math properly in order to make decisions.