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Guess i got a blackout bingo on this one. Oof.
"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn’t select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you’ll have to start this whole process over.
Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"
Let’s not forget “We need this right away!” then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren’t actually ready for it yet (if they don’t change their mind and decide they don’t actually want it at all).
It’s actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says “Well, it’s a simple task. Are you having difficulty?”.
It’s an obscure and weirdly specific law.
(This is a joke, of course.)
I have spent the past 20 years cultivating a variety of tones in which to utter my standard reply to such nonsense:
“Cool. You do it then.”
That’s a great way to handle it.
I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.
When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.
If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)
I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.
One of these is wage theft. Don’t enable that shit.
Yup. Not getting paid? Don’t work.
Forced to? We have a word for someone who is forced to work for no compensation… The word is slipping my mind, but I’m pretty sure the USA fought a civil war about it.
God, as a true scrummaster - one who believes in actual scrum - where the devs make the rules - not management… this hurts. This hurts so goddamn much.
- 4 hour planning? PMs shit the bed.
- Story points = hours? Micromanagement
- Estimate with that much accuracy? Micromanagement who are also terrible with managing their own schedules.
- It’s a simple task. - How would any business person know how long or expensive a dev task is.
And on and on, and of course you all know this. The term “Agile” has been so bastardized from it’s conception by management who think it’s a micromanagement tool. It’s quite literally the opposite. It’s mean to put the power in the hands of the developers - so they can be efficient and keep management out of their way. Management just couldn’t handle handing over a tiny bit of power though. Have to break the fundamental pillars of agile, like dictating what a point is, or how long things should take. Ugh.
I remember when I first read about AGILE. I was like “this is pretty cool - but there’s no way corporations will actually adopt this methodology without completely turning it into just a set of new names for the same shit they’ve always done.” Naturally, that’s exactly what happened.
I’ve had about three companies do agile correctly. They were either less than 10 people total or did not care at all. Any company with middle management dipped their toes in, I think because they need to prove their existence
My job uses Safe. It’s the bastardized scrum you speak of.
Are points the complexity, effort or time? Yes. No. No. Maybe. Yes. Who knows?
They also sum our teams capacity as if we are interchangeable cogs doing the 1 same simple task.
We have endless meetings. Daily 1hrs. Follow up to the follow up. Meeting to plan meetings. (I wish I was joking on this next on) Planning meetings to plan for the upcoming planning meetings.
It’s chaos.
It’s hell.
I get 5% as much actual work done as I used to. Not even joking. It’s bad.
Im not in the industry and the answer to my question might be part of the problem: have you tried to say something? / what was the outcome of you criticising the whole planning and meeting mentality?
Not the person you’re answering but usually these are not a root problem but only a symptom. The answer will range from being told that you are the problem to “let’s schedule a meeting to discuss that”.
The mentality usually stems from higher up, and you don’t really get to speak to people originating policy.
Yeah, if middle management micromanages you, that’s likely because their boss makes them answer some uncomfortable questions, if anything goes wrong.
PO: “Why does it seem like it takes a really long time to develop new features?”
Dev: “I’m glad you asked! We’ve got this piece of code (points at smoldering pile of spaghetti) that literally has to be changed every time we do anything. The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years. No one knows how it works and it’s central to the entire application. I would estimate that this easily doubles the time it takes to work each ticket. I’ve created a set of stories to rewrite this code. We just need your approval to bring it into an upcoming sprint.”
PO: “Can’t… Hear… Breaking… Up… Bad connection…”
Dev: “Uhhh… This isn’t a Teams meeting. You’re sitting in the room with us right now.”
PO: …
Dev: “We know you’re still here even if you’re not moving.”
PO: …
The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years
Four years? You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
I recently learned that a web app I wrote in 1999 (for Internet Explorer lol) is still in use by the company I wrote it for. And this app was basically a graphical front end sitting on top of a mainframe application that dated to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe POS is still running, too. My app was written in Classic ASP and Visual Basic 6 - I truly pity whatever poor bastard has to keep supporting that shit. They probably have one ancient PC in a closet somewhere acting as the server for it.
The “Story Points = Hours” hits so goddamn hard. Like, tell me you don’t fucking understand scrum without telling me you don’t understand scrum.
We had a nice, effective production process on my team until a middle manager assigned to communicate with us started in with the whole “We can’t spare this many points” bullshit.
Does 5 time trackers count as 5 points ?
“Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter”
I just had a contractor tell me I needed to prioritize their request because it’s urgent for the task they’re working on that’s adding a new feature.
they want me to push the changes out by EOD…today…Friday.
I don’t like to do this, but I hold seniority…sooo…I think I’m going to take a three hour long lunch and cut out for the weekend early.
don’t come to me with a request unless it’s actually urgent.
Story points = hours
We have the one hour daily meetings we call “standup” 🙄
Right? Minute 55-60 is the 15th minute. Fuck that. If it takes that long then the team is too big for agile or the scrum master had lost control.
If story points are now hours, I hope you’re fine with me putting a 40 on that ticket.
Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
Sources:
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work
They worked well for us
Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.
After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.
The outcomes weren’t noticably different, so now we just don’t spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.
My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn’t want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.
So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.
Unpaid overtime = work is just not going to be done.
That’s what I do at work, even though I’m salary.
Management decided to hire a new guy and then have a round of layoffs within 6 months, effectively canning someone to replace him. Since then, we’ve had multiple times where we have hundreds of tickets sitting unassigned because there’s more work than people. So shit sits and falls through the cracks until someone has time or something is on fire.
It fucking sucks, but eventually the bean counters will see that we actually needed that extra body…
We did have well over 100 tickets in the queue, now they split the support team into multiple sub support teams and each sub team has fewer tickets in their own queue. The total number is still massive but compartmentalising the problem makes most of it go away! I can filter it down to such a degree my queue is almost single figures by just ignoring everything else because that is someone elses problem.
Also my sub team doesn’t have anyone to cover 1st line on some products so I am covering 1st line there as well as 2nd line. Upside is my stats look brilliant now that I am doing all the password reset tickets.
