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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> what has to be done

Add story points to your JIRA tickets and make sure they're either 1, 2, 3 or 5 points, but if they're more than 5 points, they have to be split into multiple 5-point stories, and points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them.

Oh, yeah, and meet your commitments! We'll tell you what your commitments were.

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Thanks. Now I'm going to have nightmare fuel about one of my experiences as a young software engineer at a well known Japanese auto manufacturer in a Research and Development position. They had a mess of a software project which involved endless meetings on Jira issues, which became more about using Jira than actually solving the issues and making a quality product. This was all done on impossible timelines with outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months. We also can't forget about editing every Powerpoint presentation N to infinite times, which mostly involved moving a box or changing a color.

Any lowly Boeing engineers reading this - my condolences... Truly.

> outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months

But, of course. The productivity of the team they hired last month was just horrible, they didn't manage to finish anything! Of course they were fired.

It’s just as bad at Toyota too, trust me.

My current day-to-day apparently revolves around pointing accountants towards approved Aconex Workflows and the documents contained therein, after they email me in a panic asking for me to send them said documents and they "Don't see them" on Aconex. Yes, I am following the published-by-accounting templates and naming protocols.

Someone kill me, please.

There's a circle of hell for senior managers who swear they're being "agile" and then butt into a team's estimations and expect totals of story points so they can "increase velocity." Shouldn't have ever called it velocity in the first place; it's just a fucking WIP limit.

> points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them

Work in defense, can confirm. Add "increment planning" where we plan the sprints out 3 months. Also, voting on points? Naw, someone yell out a number and that's that.

> plan the sprints out 3 months

In an "agile" way, of course. You can be agile, you just have to say weeks in advance when you're going to be agile so we can plan around it.

I want to take “agile” proponents to a track and make them run Fibonacci multiples of 100m over and over with the only break being to ask how far they want to run next.

Who can sprint forever? It doesn’t make any sense! When do we rest? When do we train? What is this metaphor!?

Nice straw man you've got there. You're really beating the crap out of that thing. "Sprint" is just a term for something you can also call an "iteration." No one is expecting you to actually go full-throttle 24/7.

Eh, that is exactly the omega-point that end-stage capitalism is converging on.

I love it when people use the phrases "end-stage capitalism" or "late-stage capitalism," because it's basically a flashing neon sign saying "you can ignore me, because I have absolutely zero credibility." Makes it easy to move on.

Speak for yourself, buddy.

Obviously he did. I guess you wanted to say "I disagree" but phrase it more aggressively?

Then why not call it an iteration, or a round, or a week, or a month, or a cycle, or literally anything other than "sprint"?

Oh, right, because you're supposed to sprint it because that's maximally profitable (in the short-term, anyway).

What ever would our beloved boards of directors do if they found out we weren't working fast? ;)

Where I used to work, we had a “tech lead” who used to demand ICs to come up with story points.

When the actual engineers were blank about how much something costs, they had to sit through a 90 minute meeting of group-costing.

Naturally the team delivered very little despite being quite skilled. But luckily the blame fell on the lead and not on the ICs as it usually does.

I'm seeing that same pattern now. How did that weirdo version of scrumbut become so popular?

> that weirdo version

It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"

I want to believe that you are joking, but I'm afraid you are completely serious and also correct. I'm seeing an increasing drift with both this pattern and "safE" toward exactly what you describe.

Don't forget your tps reports.

It works better when you realize a lot of corporate senior leadership doesn't actually want to empower their employees. They only want to say they want to empower their employees. And then go back to being the Big Important Manager in the Big Important Office making Big Important Decisions.

That's true. Sometimes it is flatly stated too.

You see, this is how scrum really works as without this, how would we be able to control development timelines? Also mumbling compliance means it just has to be this way for unspecified reasons!

I remember being on a team that spent a little over 2 weeks doing detailed project planning and estimating. We said the project would take 8 months.

The leadership team came back and said upon further review, the project would take 3 months.

I was so relieved to hear we could get 8 months of work done in just 3!

That’s why executives get paid the big bucks!

I’ve seen teams do 2 weeks of detailed project planning and estimating where the entire project could have been done in 2 weeks by a good team if they just set their nose to grindstone and did the work.

It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.

Dealing with that right now. I have multiple PMs and directors involved in requesting another team to literally do five minutes of work because we didn't insist they put it in the current iteration and they put it several iterations away.

In a lot of places that was the real waterfall method, and also how waterfall earned its illustrious reputation.

Waterfail FTW

I'm now curious. So for how long did it actually take?

Probably got cancelled after 2 months after they realized it was going to take 6 more months.

Not sure, my contract ended a year later.

Scrum is the equivalent of top-level management needing a baby rattle or else they'll start crying for metrics because they're lost without them. Trusting their engineers and seeing their progress for themselves, rather than an abstract bastardization of that progress, would destroy their er... productivity.

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