21–28 of 28 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, no. It is far less robotic in practice and works quite well because once the schedule is better known and controlled, developers can go home on time every day. The whole crunch mode thing is effectively eliminated. Pivots get into work at the same time, work together all day and then get to leave at the exact sane normal 8 hour work day. Every single day. Sounds like a great job to me.
20 'points' (whatever they are) last week has zero bearing on what will be accomplished this week, or next or in 6 months time. Vanity metrics. Your silently forcing them to be a feature factory and act in a consistent robotic fashion no matter what the problem at hand is. I bet your tech debt velocity is increasing weekly.
So... the reason why Pivotal Tracker is still my favorite tool is because most PM's want to know when a feature is going to be done. With PT, developers assign points to stories and the 3 week average (customizable) is what makes a velocity. If velocity is 20, then 20 points worth of stories fit into an iteration (week). Points include testing, so that isn't cut out, like with sprints. As a PM, I can get developers t…
"If velocity is 20, then 20 points worth of stories fit into an iteration" -> When was software engineering so regimented, predictable and precise. This sort of mentality treats engineers as robotic and is a cancer in the industry currently.
Awesome - it happened I was exactly thinking about a tool like this when on a long meeting call today. I have clients that refuse to use another tool, refuse another sign up in their email account . In the same time those clients are mostly chaotic to unorganized and we tend to repeat the same points over and over again in the course of a year until all points are fulfilled (web platform dev work). This tool seems li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, no. It is far less robotic in practice and works quite well because once the schedule is better known and controlled, developers can go home on time every day. The whole crunch mode thing is effectively eliminated. Pivots get into work at the same time, work together all day and then get to leave at the exact sane normal 8 hour work day. Every single day. Sounds like a great job to me.
20 'points' (whatever they are) last week has zero bearing on what will be accomplished this week, or next or in 6 months time. Vanity metrics. Your silently forcing them to be a feature factory and act in a consistent robotic fashion no matter what the problem at hand is. I bet your tech debt velocity is increasing weekly.
The whole idea is not to force people into a box. It is to just give PM's a way to plan the future. Obviously, things can change so it isn't some forceful thing at all.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. I had an opinion like you and then I went and worked in this system and it totally changed my mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, no. It is far less robotic in practice and works quite well because once the schedule is better known and controlled, developers can go home on time every day. The whole crunch mode thing is effectively eliminated. Pivots get into work at the same time, work together all day and then get to leave at the exact sane normal 8 hour work day. Every single day. Sounds like a great job to me.
If a team is great at pointing, and the lead/PM is good at scoping then I tend to agree with this. I've seen 1 team good enough at pointing to do 2 week Sprints, call their velocity, and generally nail it. It was a small federal team on a mature (7 year old) coldfusion application with a backlog that mainly involved minor features and bug fixes, where the app had a narrow clear scope. The startups I've been involved…
I do agree that the PM has to be excellent at writing stories and the team has to be good at pushing back on the PM to say that a story is too big and to break it up appropriately into smaller stories.
Two week sprints are awful. Nobody should ever be in that. The problem is that the team works for 2 weeks and then after those two weeks, everyone stands up and shows what they did. If you don't hit the mark, then it is another two weeks. Now a single feature can be held up for 4+ weeks! Or even worse, you cut out things like testing to make the 2 week sprint.
The pivotal model of making smaller features and factoring in testing into the pointing ensures that nobody is working alone for 2 weeks without any oversight.