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Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

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Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#51

Post by CrLf »

everdev wrote: post #48
spenczar5 wrote: post #5

I think the author misses what the purpose of deadlines is. They are contracts between organizations for when software will be available, which are used for other organizations to make informed decisions without needing very tight and constant communication. They're analogous to SLAs in service-oriented designs. In a moderately large (say, 500+ employee) organization, deadlines are essential to get anything done. Sup…

Also, there's a theory that projects take the time you give them. There are some deadlines that are too short that can't be hit, but if you have a project your team has done before in 4 weeks and give them 8 weeks, it'll take 8 weeks. The reason is it can always be improved. There are always more edge cases and more automation that can be added. Plus, many people would gladly work at half speed rather than full speed…

If something needs 8 weeks to be done and you give the team 4 weeks to do it, chances are it's going to take 12 weeks.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#52

Post by dec0dedab0de »

glhaynes wrote: post #42
captainbland wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, "sprint" (which obviously implies moving at the greatest speed possible for a human on foot, pushing themselves to a point which cannot be sustained for long distances) is pretty poor terminology for something meant to represent something happening at a sustainable pace. I'm sure I'm not the first or last person to point this out, though.

When I first heard the term “sprint” I thought it was surely being used so they could later make some point like “since sprinting is of course unsustainable, we introduce weeks of relaxation between them”... Nope!

Me too. I actually proposed 3 day sprints at work Tuesday-Thursday. With Monday and Friday being for meetings and nonsense. They laughed at me like I was joking.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#53

Post by Insanity »

I actually like deadlines. They challenge me to get my work done and somehow that appeals to the competitive side of me I suppose.

It has been like that since I studied at uni and it continued like that throughout my career.

So to say they are bad for me seems silly. Different people work in different ways. :)

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#54

Post by andrei_says_ »

Justsignedup wrote: post #34
spenczar5 wrote: post #5

I think the author misses what the purpose of deadlines is. They are contracts between organizations for when software will be available, which are used for other organizations to make informed decisions without needing very tight and constant communication. They're analogous to SLAs in service-oriented designs. In a moderately large (say, 500+ employee) organization, deadlines are essential to get anything done. Sup…

An even simpler way to put it: I have $1,000,000 in the bank. I have 10 engineers. If we don't make at least a break-even income in 6 months I have to fire 10 engineers. So you have 2 months to build something so I can spend 4 months hyping people up to buy a bunch of it or we close down. And I know your engineer asses ain't gonna write bug-free code.

Given that the amount of communication grows exponentially with the number of people working on the project maybe you could rent out 5 of the engineers and make the project go faster :)

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#55

Post by crgwbr »

captainbland wrote: post #38
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #15

The author deeply misunderstands Scrum. They also misspell it as SCRUM but that's another story... Sprints are timeboxes and not deadlines. Stuff is done at a "normal" pace and it either fits (or does not) in that timebox. Fundamentally, it does not really matter in itself. Noting down whether the estimation was correct or not, though, is important. The whole point is that a team is supposed to get more _predictable_…

As an aside, "sprint" (which obviously implies moving at the greatest speed possible for a human on foot, pushing themselves to a point which cannot be sustained for long distances) is pretty poor terminology for something meant to represent something happening at a sustainable pace. I'm sure I'm not the first or last person to point this out, though.

Agreed. A few places I’ve worked have tended to call them cycles, at least partly for that reason.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#56

Post by koonsolo »

laumars wrote: post #35
cuspycode wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of deadlines: the ones imposed by objective facts (like for example the Y2K deadline), and the ones imposed by arbitrary decisions (like for example a milestone in a project plan). I think it is important to distinguish the two.

There's also a 3rd kind of deadline and they're the worst kind. It's the " our sales team have already told the customer it will be ready by then so you need to tell me how you're going to achieve that " deadline. I can deal with hard technical deadlines and project milestones - the former is a fact of life and the latter is often required to help focus larger projects. What I emphatically dislike is sales guys makin…

I used to dislike this too, mainly because they put the problem in your bucket.

The solution is to not let this problem end up on your side. "We will see what we can do, but since we didn't make any estimate on this, the risk of failing the deadline is on you. If you want to set a proper deadline next time for my team, consult me first so we can do a proper estimation. I hope it works out for you this time."

I also had plenty of cases where we had to reach an imposed deadline. Then 2 weeks later you ask "did they find issues?". "No, they didn't deploy it yet"

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#57

Post by welly »

massivecali wrote: post #43
je42 wrote: post #9

ok, it looks like this guy has never worked in a working SCRUM environment. > Suggesting that meeting a sprint by cutting corners is a thing. Yes, in bad scrum implementations. SCRUM and KANBAN have both pro's and con's. If you can't implement SCRUM in a good way, you will also have a problem with KANBAN. There some good discussions about on online like https://fenix.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/3779576751814/...…

There's nothing about the scrum process that helps me, as an engineer, to work more efficiently. I work at the same pace regardless of what fictional story points are assigned to a task. The entire charade is only for middle managers to communicate up the chain what is happening. Velocity can be massaged so easily that it is a useless metric.

If story points are fictional then that's not the fault of the process, it's the fault of the person who made the estimation.

If you've been working as a developer for any length of time, you should know roughly how long a particular task is going to take you.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#58

Post by adrianmsmith »

pwm wrote: post #39

Regarding creativity what I found over my time writing code is that you need time to do deep thinking. That’s the only way I know of to harness complexity successfully. Here is the twist: you don’t know how much time you need doing it because you don’t know when realisations emerge. The problem with deadlines is that they create stress and stress is the enemy of deep thinking. The funny thing is that while a deadline…

Further, having a meeting e.g. at 10am every day (daily standup) means that it’s unlikely you’ll get any deep thinking done during the morning, so that just leaves the afternoon. Adopting daily standups at a fixed time as dictated by Scrum reduces your team’s deep thinking time by 50%.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#59

Post by admax88q »

falcor84 wrote: post #37
mpweiher wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your answer to them is "I can't tell you, we just do stuff on the kanban board and don't think about deadlines," they're (1) going to be less than thrilled with you, decreasing trust, and (2) unable to make their decision effectively. I think the point is that if you do make those commitments you are just making things up, in reality those commitments are worth pretty much exactly as much as not making the commi…

>I think the point is that if you do make those commitments you are just making things up, in reality those commitments are worth pretty much exactly as much as not making the commitments. Well, reality is not that harsh and there is a middle ground. It definitely is possible to complete things on schedule. Assuming "cost, time and scope - choose two" as a reasonable model, there are trade-offs you can make to get th…

That's not a reasonable model though. You cannot pick "time+scope". As has been well documented in software adding money to a project does not necessarily make it move any faster.

Re: Deadlines and sprints are bad for you

#60

Post by laumars »

koonsolo wrote: post #56
laumars wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a 3rd kind of deadline and they're the worst kind. It's the " our sales team have already told the customer it will be ready by then so you need to tell me how you're going to achieve that " deadline. I can deal with hard technical deadlines and project milestones - the former is a fact of life and the latter is often required to help focus larger projects. What I emphatically dislike is sales guys makin…

I used to dislike this too, mainly because they put the problem in your bucket. The solution is to not let this problem end up on your side. "We will see what we can do, but since we didn't make any estimate on this, the risk of failing the deadline is on you. If you want to set a proper deadline next time for my team, consult me first so we can do a proper estimation. I hope it works out for you this time." I also h…

This isn't something you can get away with in many businesses (at least not in terms of the kind of businesses that would put you in that position to begin with) - and the few you can do this, it's not something you'd want to do frequently because you can end up being seen as an obstruction and that ultimately works against your interests.

I've found it's better to work with them on a compromised phased released / MVP so the customer still gets what they asked for and you are still seen a miracle worker albeit without actually having to do anything unrealistic in the end.

Unfortunately though, there are some businesses that place their sales team too far ahead of the health of their engineers for any compromise to happen and there isn't really much you can do aside taking the overtime pay and move on shortly afterwards.

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