Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

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And sprints!

When I started at my current job, I naively looked at the bugs and tasks assigned to me, and started picking and fixing the highest priority tickets.

Then I was informed, "Oh no, that's not how we do things here. Don't look at the priority, just work on what is assigned to you in the current sprint."

I had never heard of sprints before.

More recently, I had a conversation with my manager and asked, "Do we really need sprints? I've been in this business a long time. 10, 20, 30 years ago we didn't have sprints and somehow still managed to produce great software."

The reply was "But if we didn't have sprints, how could we possibly measure the team's productivity and individual productivity?"

I knew I wouldn't win this debate, so I politely let it drop. I just wanted to sow some seeds of doubt.

In all fairness, my manager is a very reasonable person. But when this devotion to sprints is ingrained in the entire company, it is hard to question it or get away from it.

At least we don't do daily standups!

That's normal nowadays, even in the most ridiculous of situations.

I once found that a system was getting a little expensive. As, AWS was billing us a million a month expensive. I figured this out, and came up with a plan that would cut it down to 80 thousand by spending 4 days: You know, a mild, 11 million a year of savings. Management insisted that the work had to go through scheduling, and intake, a process that would involve zero developers looking at anything, but would delay doing the task a month and a half.

And no, nothing the team was working on came even remotely close to that ROI. Following the process just cost an extra 1.5 million dollars.

What was the opportunity cost of potentially deprioritizing other work?

^ nothing the team was working on came even remotely close to that ROI.

I read it as that the opportunity cost would be lower.

The manager probably can't take the credit for saving 10 million dollars if they don't put it through the system.

The reply was "But if we didn't have sprints, how could we possibly measure the team's productivity and individual productivity?"

"Do you really need to measure that, or perhaps something else is more important?"

"But if we didn't have sprints, how could we possibly measure the team's productivity and individual productivity?"

A more enlightening question might be what actionable information about productivity they are gaining from the sprint-based metrics.

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