I'd also add a large backlog of tasks is very depressing.
If everyday you saw you had 100 more things to do and no matter how much you finish, the list doesn't go down, it's not exactly motivating.
Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
61–70 of 165 posts
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#62When one uses manufacturing job (burgers) as metaphor for software development, then you see that the guru thinks it is menial labour as opposed to knowledge-dominated process. Move along, there is little understanding to acquire from this post.
I’ve had too many managers that thought this and none of them knew the first thing about software. They weren’t very successful.
It’s a huge red flag for me if I realise someone at an organisation has this mindset.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#63When one uses manufacturing job (burgers) as metaphor for software development, then you see that the guru thinks it is menial labour as opposed to knowledge-dominated process. Move along, there is little understanding to acquire from this post.
The article is actually about this! How manufacturing processes are not a one to one comparison with software work.
> The reason many people fail to acknowledge and act upon transaction costs in the software industry is that they compare software — a design process — to manufacturing processes.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#64So, The Phoenix Project could have been an article?
Nice!
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get a pretty good ratio by doing very little using only that metric.
A slightly better one: (committed + 1)/(completed + 2)
Wouldn't you prefer (committed + 1) / completed? Or (committed + 2) / (completed + 1)?
In the limit, you want this to approach 1 (namely, you complete more or less everything you commit). A bad situation is where you're overcommitted and have many committed things, but few completed ones (e.g. 10/2), which results in a high ratio. But, with your proposed metric, you'd achieve the asymptotically ideal ratio with 2 committed projects and only 1 completed one, and in fact the global optimum is "I promised nothing and did nothing, yet achieved a ratio of 50%".
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#66I would like for more people to read this. leaders and developers. The most challenging aspect of software development is finishing. In contrast, it's incredibly simple to open new projects, features, and issues. Opening numerous tracks simultaneously causes the entire team to work at a crawl, and the traditional solution is to simply put in extra hours or take short cuts, which increases tech debt over time. Battle fire with fire.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#67I think those initial diagrams/explanations miss a key detail. The longest step in cooking burgers is the grilling step, in which the cook is just waiting for the burgers to cook, and won't speed up the process by giving attention to one burger instead of 2. The idea that 3 burgers would take 12 minutes while 1 takes 4 isn't realistic, even without all the batch processing math later in the article. I still agree wit…
This was the most glaring flaw of the post. They almost got there when they started talking about the “transaction costs” but failed to acknowledge idle times. To drive this home to software development, if I’m blocked on a requirements clarification, awaiting permissions to a data source, or blocked by a bug in an external system it certainly doesn’t make sense for me to just do nothing. I should pick up another tas…
Strongly agree. I try to limit my WIP tasks to around 8, and even then it's a constant struggle to keep at least one unblocked.
The burger shop analogy seems a little nonsensical too. Most of the time it takes for a burger to be made is waiting for the meat to cook. Conveyor grills exist, it's rare for grill space to be a limiting factor. So, burgers absolutely are assembled in parallel, it's a good example of the opposite strategy to the one the author is advocating.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having to report every day during the daily stand up felt like micromanagement to me. But that's just me. Many people do seem like to have this kind of daily routine so your mileage may vary obviously. Having to fit tasks in two weeks periods was a problem too, with all these ceremonial meetings where we end up having to make things up and which actually take a lot of time. Being able to give feedback is good, but I…
> Having to report every day during the daily stand up felt like micromanagement to me. But that's just me. Many people do like having this kind of daily routine so mileage may vary obviously. Same here. I used to be in a team with daily stand-ups, reporting to the manager what work I did the day before, and they killed my will to work, consequently causing me to work ~3 times slower, which presumably is the opposite…
The problem is that a lot
of developers (especially junior ones) make shitty decisions and/or just work slowly without the accountability of having to say what they worked on (and having to explain why what they said they will “finish today” 4 times already isn’t yet finished for the 5th time).
They are not necessarily bad developers, just need the need the external motivator.
If you have 10+ years of experience and you repeatedly make shitty decisions or keep drastically underestimating your work instead of introducing accountability via daily standups you can simply be fired.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#69I believe that those first explanations and graphics are missing an important aspect. The step in the burger-cooking process that takes the longest is the grilling step, during which the cook does nothing but wait for the burgers to finish cooking. The cook cannot speed up the process by focusing on only one burger at a time instead of both. Even without all of the math on batch processing that is presented later in the article, the idea that it would take 12 minutes to cook three burgers while it only takes 4 minutes to cook one is not plausible.
Re: Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
#70It is readable, simple to comprehend for engineering, product, and management; it adds no value to the game; and it positively rewards finishing what you started. It is exceedingly difficult to precisely forecast when a whole product will ship, much less when a complete feature will be released. However, if one breaks a feature down into its legible constituent components and then commits to completing just what is within that (which also necessitates any required communication in order to arrive at an understanding of the requirements), then over time one can become quite good at predicting what one will be able to get done in a sprint and better at only committing to what one believes they can actually complete.