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Eight points for one team is two points for another team

lloydatkinson.net

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Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#41

Post by jahewson »

randomdata wrote: post #9
21723 wrote: post #2

Whatever Agile was, it's absolute garbage these days. It largely exists to hold developers maximally accountable to the business, at the expense of technical excellence or even maintenance, which can be expressed in its gun-language of Jira tickets and so get ignored. Fuck user stories, fuck sprints, fuck Jira, and fuck product management (a job in which one defines success by getting into one's boss's job as fast as…

> Whatever Agile was Has it changed? The Manifesto[1] is still there, unmodified, to provide thoughts on what you need to consider if you are going to run a software project without managers. > Fuck user stories, fuck sprints, fuck Jira, and fuck product management That does not sound like Aglie, especially given that you specifically call out managers, which are incongruent with Agile. The top-down organization wher…

Agile is the No True Scotsman of development methodologies. It claims not to be prescriptive but if you don’t get good outcomes, you’re doing it wrong! Meanwhile you should follow these 5 rules, but remember there are no rules.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#42

Post by jahewson »

ajmurmann wrote: post #38
randomdata wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever Agile was Has it changed? The Manifesto[1] is still there, unmodified, to provide thoughts on what you need to consider if you are going to run a software project without managers. > Fuck user stories, fuck sprints, fuck Jira, and fuck product management That does not sound like Aglie, especially given that you specifically call out managers, which are incongruent with Agile. The top-down organization wher…

Much of the usage of the term Agile now refers to Scrum which took Agile and made it into something digestible mb large corporations and business people and made it easily sellable and reproducible. It's a corruption of Agile. Even the term "sprint" makes me angry. We aren't sprinting! This isn't even a marathon! We are running forever and I want to run fast forever, not sprint and burn out after a short time.

Scrum predates Agile by eight years.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#43

Post by drstewart »

21723 wrote: post #2

Whatever Agile was, it's absolute garbage these days. It largely exists to hold developers maximally accountable to the business, at the expense of technical excellence or even maintenance, which can be expressed in its gun-language of Jira tickets and so get ignored. Fuck user stories, fuck sprints, fuck Jira, and fuck product management (a job in which one defines success by getting into one's boss's job as fast as…

>technical excellence

Technical excellence doesn't pay the bills.

Curious - what products do you pay for due to their technical excellence of their backend instead of the value they provide you directly?

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#44

Post by itronitron »

notjustanymike wrote: post #15

This post is starting to fill up with what sounds like a kind of hopelessness mixed with anger against Agile. It's possible to do sprints, pointing, demos, and retros well, but you have to own it as the engineering team. This means understanding and adapting the process to your needs. Agree on your definition of done. Set boundaries for pointing. Prevent confusing or unfinished stories from being point. Communicate h…

My experience with Agile has been that it is a powerful equalizer of everyone on the team. The degree to which a person's productivity is equal to others on their team may impact whether they consider that a net positive.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#45

Post by msandford »

notjustanymike wrote: post #15

This post is starting to fill up with what sounds like a kind of hopelessness mixed with anger against Agile. It's possible to do sprints, pointing, demos, and retros well, but you have to own it as the engineering team. This means understanding and adapting the process to your needs. Agree on your definition of done. Set boundaries for pointing. Prevent confusing or unfinished stories from being point. Communicate h…

"Just demand the respect that the business isn't giving you. What's the worst that could happen?"

You didn't say exactly that, but that's kind of the undertone of what you wrote.

If you live in the US and you demand your right to a fair trial, well good on you. But if you live somewhere perhaps less committed to such a thing, making the demand doesn't mean anything other than you're naive and foolish.

So it goes in some companies as well. If they don't have the values the demand isn't you being courageous. It's you painting a target on your back.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#46

Post by soneca »

dfxm12 wrote: post #18
notjustanymike wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your anger sounds directed at the dysfunction within your organization. In particular if you hate product management then you've clearly ended up in a bad place. A good product manager is a joy, someone who is a partner to the engineering team instead of an antagonist.

Maybe they're rare, too. I am but one person, but I've yet to work with one that I'd describe as a "joy".

I have worked with a few. It made my job much easier. I’ve worked with a couple that were neutral to my job, but I’ve yet to work with one I hated

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#47

Post by tuke »

It is worth noting that Scrum, for one, does not require (or even recommend, at least according to the latest Scrum Guide) story estimating or pointing.

I would agree that in practice all of those anti-patterns related to story estimating/pointing can work against the values of the Agile Manifesto.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#48

Post by henryfjordan »

mickimnet wrote: post #20
js8 wrote: post #12

This reminds me of the now classic article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... It essentially claims that "good agile" is Kanban, and Kanban is essentially abolishing of any forecasting in favor of actually doing the tasks, like the CPUs do when executing programs.

Not debating about estimating or not. I'm only replying to the example: CPUs can only execute, what the instructions tell them to do—like a production line—and not solve / create something (new).

Kanban was originally designed for production lines in car factories, so it works. If you go to any McDonalds and look at the screens in the back you'll see orders represented a lot like tickets.

In Agile, "points" are just an abstraction around work to try to normalize it in the same way that every burger+fries combo should be roughly equivalent.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#49

Post by d23 »

Yeah, it's all a garbage dump. The only thing that matters in most cases: roughly how much time is this going to take and does that amount of time change the task's priority. If there are external teams who need to have the timelines communicated to them, communicate it to the degree you are certain, and then calm down and do the work.

Re: Eight points for one team is two points for another team

#50

Post by randomdata »

ajmurmann wrote: post #40
randomdata wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right in your second point, at least. Whatever you develop out of the thoughts of Agile won’t be called Agile. It is its own thing, with whatever new name you decide to give it.

You can build your own processes around Agile principles. As long as you don't carve the processes in stone and revisit them you still can be Agile.

Reading the principles of Agile does not make what you're doing Agile any more than reading the words of the bible makes what you're doing Bible, even if you took something useful out of that reading. Whatever it is you end up doing is what you decide to call it.

Agile is more like a checklist of things to remember if you're going to operate without managers. Like, stay in touch with the business people, keep your work available for other developers to see, work with people who can be motivated without a manager hovering over them, etc. All obvious when you think about what role managers fill and what you need to do if they're gone, but still a decent reminder if you're serious about going down that road.

It's not something you do, rather something you can think about if you've decided managers aren't the right fit for your project.

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