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This story is 100% true.
I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.
The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”
So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”
So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.
Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…
After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.
Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.
It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.
The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.
I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.7 -
"Let's do some pair programming! It will be fun!"
... Fuck no.
Either I start coding and you open a beer, or the other way around. And sure, I do not mind doing each other's code reviews. I respect your feedback.
But I can't look over your shoulder while you misspell keywords. When I write code, I search, try, debug and play at a high speed.
I'm an impressionist/surrealist writing messy passionate functions, breaking lots of things with broad paintbrush strokes before finishing it into detailed perfection. I remember all the places in the code I need to work on, and cover everything with tests.
You're a baroque coder, sometimes even a hyperrealist, with your two-finger 10 wpm typing, writing code strictly line-by-line, decorating every statement with the right checks & typehints in advance. You can not keep two functions in your head at the same time. You write tests reluctantly, but you hate that I barely plan. You plan everything, including your pee breaks.
As a coworker I respect you.
But there is no bigger hell than pair programming with you.14 -
The following dialogue is inspired by a career of similar conversations.
--
Manager: What's the status?
Dev: It works, but I just found a security hole. That contractor did not sanitize all the different kinds of user input and someone approved the PR with "LGTM." A customer can run malicious code and get us in real trouble. I'm patching this now.
Manager: How long with that take?
Dev: If done right, 4-5 days. If done fast, I can squeeze 3.
Manager: Let's not boil the ocean. We need to ship by tomorrow so we can't spend too much time on something that we can fix later.
Dev: Surprising deadline aside, I made a Jira workflow state called "Later" for when you close the ticket after this conversation.
Manager: We need to talk about how your negativity impacts the team.
Dev: Sorry. I just don't want to knowingly release a critical vuln.
Manager: We can introduce a procedural change and have ops vet the documents. We already have a screen where they can approve what uploads get to the customer. If we let a bad egg through, then we'll right-size according to customer feedback.
Dev: Lawsuits are feedback?
Manager:
Manager: I mean
Dev: *Googles "brain parasite symptoms"*
Manager: Hey. The kind of thing you are worried about probably won't happen soon, and we'll be able to handle things in the short term.
Dev: Because it's better that our staff have unprotected sex with the Internet on our corporate network than use a few more days to move everyone along worry-free?
Manager: It's a calculated risk. We're Agile after all, right?
Dev: When it's an excuse.9 -
Job offer:
"There is no hierarchy within this company."
Bullshit.
Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.
Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.
You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.
Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.
Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?
And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.
How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?
That's what I would find much more interesting.17 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.7 -
Manager: I need estimates for your sprint tasks
Me: I've never done any of this before, my estimates have no context and are effectively worthless
Manager: don't worry it's just for the Jira board.
Me: OK *gives estimates*
End of sprint comes...
Manager: Why isn't task X done?
Me: *sigh*
I don't miss my old job :)
3 -
/* Daily sit down meeting */
What did you work on yesterday?
- Tea
What are you working on today?
- Tea
Any road blocks?
- *sips tea* ...nah no14 -
Fuck. My new job in the public sector requires me to sign paper applications to access JIRA or git. It takes them 4 days to process, so now I am waiting at home doing nothing. I’ll still get paid a competitive developer salary, though.
If you are a EU citizen from a country that subsidizes Poland, you can be sure that your taxes are well spent on my couch :)12 -
Bus-Factor: A new metric to describe how well kowledge is distributed among the team members by calculating how many of your team members can be run over by a bus without killing your project!6
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Let's build a house with no blueprint, no idea how it should look but have daily meetings about the bathroom... #Scrum3
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Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!
Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.
His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".8 -
When you have a product owner who, on her first day of the project, asks you ' What do you mean by UI?' and a week later question a UI dev why should something take 3 days?
Are you fucking kidding me? I am done with this shit.3 -
Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.
Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.
2 months go by, project is completed.
Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!
1 month later...
PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.
2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.
Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.3 -
Holy shit balls it works (so far)
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So I’ve been working on a project... well feature for the past year (yes 12 whole fucking months - anti agile I know)
And today I got to merge that bitch of a pull request into the current working branch and deploy it to UAT - no conflicts 😵I think I need to put the lottery on tonight!
And some how, by some stupid lucky roll of the dice it just works.
I have never felt so afraid and delighted in my life!6 -
worst part of working in scrum: trying to remember what you worked on Friday for Monday morning's stand-up meeting.2
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When you move from one "agile" company to a truly agile company. Wow. Productivity has gone through the roof!2
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My company has about 6 devs divided into 2 teams, 3 mobile devs and 3 web devs. One day, a guy suggest us adopting daily stand-ups to know what everyone's working on. I guess our subscription for Jira is now useless.
Personally, as a bad employee, I usually come in 5-10 minutes after everyone, so I missed most of the stand-ups. It's boring, it's just people stand in circle and say what they did yesterday.
I ended up created a slack bot to post a message at a previous defined time to say what I did yesterday to the team. Jira | Trello | Pivotal Tracker are born for a reason guys...7 -
No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.
I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.
I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.
I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.
I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.
I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.
I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.
I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.
Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.
See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?
Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.
Hugs and kisses,
Platypus15 -
Looking at one particular job ad
“Experience with agile”
“Excellent knowledge of agile frameworks”
“Work with agile software development team”
Basically in the first few paragraphs it mentions agile about 10 times.
Then the first bullet point in the essential column
“Must have experience working to tight deadlines”
D’oh3 -
Management said "we are agile"...now they ordered us to do changes in production server in daylight...I'm seriously think said FRAGILE...3
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Delivering next 6 month’s product roadmap to CEO, other directors and senior management.
I know it’s all going to change.
They know it’s all going to change.
I know they know.
They know I know.
No words are spoken. -
Agile: ✅
Agile practices: ✅
Certified Agile practitioners: ❌😡 powerpoint jockeys 👺💥⚡️failed programmers 💩 timewasting idiots 😥 -
Six people(4 engineers, 2 managers) in the room, it took fucking 45 mins for daily scrum/standup meeting. Seriously, why do you want talk about every line you wrote?
I excused myself after 35 mins.7 -
Attendance at the daily standup [related to a project that hasn't even started yet] is mandatory!
What did you work on yesterday?
An unrelated project.
What are you working on today?
An unrelated project.
What are you working on for the next 3-6 months?
You guessed it: An unrelated project.
Any blockers?
This is interfering with an unrelated project, but when Agile says "jump", you say "how high?"!4 -
U know this guy, whos Shady AS FUCK..
He waited until the end of the daily(when noone was putting attention) to make an agreement with the PO about some decisions of the user history..
He doesnt even know WTF is doing, so he wanted to swap his user history for another one..
U & ALL THE PEOPLE WHO NEVER WORK WITH THE TEAM & USE PRIVATES CHATS TO CONTROL OTHERS!
FUCK U!!3 -
We use scrum in our company.
And with scrum I mean we don't have a scrum master, our senior developer is the project owner, we estimate in hours and the estimate is binding, so you are not allowed to work longer on a task than the estimate.
So yeah.. "scrum"4 -
Every piece of work I have to do is blocked, waiting on someone else pulling their finger out. 2 days now, and no progress no matter how much I chase. Bored!7
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When your team wants to do daily scrum but there's only four of you and you work for different clients.1
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New PM thinks it's a great idea to start micromanaging my team's (private) repo names. Can't wait to hear his opinions on our class and variable names! 😭3
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Corporation.
Meeting with middle level managers.
Me - data scientist, saying data science stuff, like what accuracy we have and what problems with performance we managed to solved.
Manager 1: Ok, but is this scrum?
Manager 2: No they're using kanban.
Manager 3: That's no good. We should be using DevOps, can we make it DevOps?
So yea, another great meeting I guess..4 -
Gotta love product owners that don't seem to understand agile.
We delivered the set number of items in the sprint we committed to plus a little extra polish. During the last day of the sprint we're spending the time to push all our work to UAT do he can actually perform acceptance testing...
He decides he should chase all of us up on stuff that we never commited to or even mentioned we'd touch.
Had to explain it to him at least 5 times during the day.5 -
Agile Coach: you need to take part in the next quarter planning of the work. Work with your business team to create a healthy backlog. Provide your input to the user stories. It’s a collective effort.
Me: why tf it’s not a collective effort when code breaks and only one dev is trying to fix it while taking in all the heat.
Of course I can’t say that out loud without getting fired.4 -
I only wish that my agile team comes up with the task breakup and documents the implementation approach to our project, as good as this kid did, while panning for a party!
img source: reddit
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When your product owner tells you to forget about architecture and unit testing, "just push it out"...
2 -
The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.
So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.
Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!6 -
When an application has tons of security holes and fixes never make it into sprint prioritization because "they're not new features"4
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I'm crying-
And idk if I'm crying from it being so funny or so sad...
Forwarded to me by my boss, found somewhere on the internet, creds to who made it
3 -
Infinity is defined by the time it takes for a group of developers to reach an agreement about what is the "Definition of Done".3
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When the PO asks for a last second code change right before the sprint review, and now it's your turn to demo
2 -
Scrum Master? More like Scum Master.. The nutjob sends a calendar invite for daily stand up for 30 minutes which extends to 50 minutes.. 50 minutes for a team of 6 people ? Fuck off.7
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Broken teams,
define Agile principles in 2 lines :
Take 2X to your velocity,
and work 80hours a week ;)3 -
Me : There is a hotfix needs to be done.
Boss : So what ?
Me : Its assigned to you from last 2 weeks and deadlines are near.
Boss: (speaking politely) oh.. is it? Can you take a look ?
Me : .. -
I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.
-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"
There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.
Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.
Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.
If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.1 -
In "Sprint Planning", the team is supposed to come up with stories, break those down into tasks, estimate those tasks as a team, then let devs choose what tasks they want to work on based on the stories pulled into that particular sprint.
Instead, our manager creates the stories. He assigns the stories to each developer and then has that developer announce his theoretical tasks (without any research on feature's or project's requirements!) in front of the entire team. So, when I say, "I think it will take me 6 hours to implement this feature", he says, "6 hours? I think it will take 3." and then types the estimate as 3. I have so much rage when that happens. Then we continue to sit in the room for 2.5 hours where we go through this long data entry mess of him typing out tasks and second guessing estimates. There is no team deliberation or collaboration, its whatever the manager says.
While there are many issues I take with this approach, my pet peeve would be the second guessing of the estimates. It would make sense for teams members to second guess estimates as long as they are the same teammates who have the ability and possibility to take on the tasks themselves.
But I disagree with a manager seconding guessing an implementation feature that "I" definitely have to do alone, and they do not possess the immediate knowledge to implement it themselves.5 -
You know what's fun? When your client insists you use an agile process with a delivery at the end of each sprint, then proceeds to bitch at each release at the features that weren't implemented yet. The thing isn't even slated to be done until 4Q 2018 and is on schedule/early. Glad I am not on that team . . . yet.
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One Pro Tip for all developers :
(in my experience - a short story)
Our team chose agile development. We have items to deliver each sprint.
I was the guy who would always slip in my tasks due to issues that would pop up.
It was due to my own faults, I was less careful and failed to concentrate on one single item when I was working.
I started slipping a lot and my manager started questioning me on my performance. I tried a lot of productivity apps and other methods. Nothing seemed to change my life.
One day, An experienced person in the team said to me,
"Start Going to the gym" and it'll change everything.
I enrolled to the nearest gym and started working out every morning. Had sore arms /legs in the first few days. Nothing seemed to change.
After one week, my work patterns changed. I automatically started to work with a lot of concentration. I still don't know how things changed.
After 2 weeks, everything was completely different.
I was able to complete my sprint tasks in the first few days and started contributing to others work. Got a lot of recognition. My work was recognized a lot and my manager appreciated me.
So this is a real life changer folks.
"start hitting the GYM", and it'll change your life.
Please try it out and tell me how your work patterns change.4 -
Fuck me I'm pissed. This sprint, my tech lead has been away and a senior dev has been covering for him. We plan a load of work and distribute stories and we churn threw it quite well. However, my senior dev says let's not deploy until all the works done. I was like, how is it going to be tested? He was like well it will be fine because it's all one test. Bs. We now have 2 days left, tester is getting stressed because they don't know what to test or what's been finished. Scrum master is asking why all of it should be tested at the same time and I'm here like this is fucking dumb. Also the tester decided to start testing with the most complex piece of work, rather than prioritising.
Starting to wonder if I'm just the outsider or whether no one understands that granularity is better.2 -
Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.
Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.
Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.
I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.2 -
Is there anyone else who works at a company that takes longer to plan sprints than the actual sprints?2
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Ok, so we have the Spotify Agile Model now (tribes, squads, chapters, etc). I have seen it implemented in a few large companies, and they seem to be doing ok.
It's just... doesn't anyone worry about the product that came out of this great way of working?
Spotify is great as a service, but it has to have one of the worst usability/success ratios of any modern mobile / web app. You can almost feel the various squads doing their own thing, not thinking about the whole experience.
Doesn't the product count when considering using someone's way of working? Is the Spotify Agile Model the project management equivalent of Twitter's Bootstrap?5 -
As I am now in a leading position in the middle of a agile transition:
has anyone got a source for a project done completely with user stories?
I am searching a real life example with already finished stories an active backlog and a documentation.
I just can't wrap my head around it. When and what do you document? In which Form do you document? How are you writing user stories with more content like diagrams and such?
(we use jira and confluence but just started with stories)
I read some articles on the topic and watched some talks but sill don't get the picture.8 -
Since I started working at my current job, I've been growing to admire agile development more and more (or the ideal at least) to the point where I manage my LIFE with an agile perspective now!
It honestly works so well! 😁3 -
Our agile scrum team has finally shattered into two parts.
On the one hand we have front-end guys.
On the other hand we have backend- /dev-ops guys.
The FE guys don't care about the BE guys business.
They don't join pairworking and only noticing things that went bad, when a Backend guy has caused it.
Goodbye fullstack dev-ops team...
I really dislike that arrogant basterds.
Frontend Hobo-Bitches...! -
Hello World. I've been lurking for 2 weeks and finally created an account. Introduction is in order.
I'm a web developer in my mid 20s, recently worked at a company that uses Golang. I like memes, especially doge/cate/birb memes. My company uses Slack for internal chatting, and I've been setting up memes as Slack profile pictures, updated every 1-2 weeks. Maybe someday I'll share some.
Also, I'll try my first rant. My company uses Agile, but why does it seems like no one understand it? Product managers just want their "features" to finish and then making new "features" every new months. Or am I having the wrong understanding about agile? Can a project oriented team be called agile?11 -
How do your companies do things? Does your development team have much autonomy from the non-technical side of the business?
I work in an agency and we have yet to actually get a proper workflow in place for things, its getting quite irritating.
So, we have a ticketing system in place and its not used anywhere near properly. In theory you could design a whole project in Jira and use that to handle all of your status updates, the PM's would just, you-know... read it.
In the morning we have "stand-ups" where for some reason we will have project/task briefings/long speeches lumped in before developers get onto talking about what they're working on and naturally if they have any blockers. Then at the end of this "stand-up" everybody has to write down what they just said onto post-it notes so the PM team have an idea of what everybody is working on that day.
So essentially, every developers day is micro-managed from the business side with exactly what they're working on.
Throughout the week there may be bug tickets that come in, these tickets are thrown into developers outlook calendars so they know which day to do them on.
For some reason nobody has considered that you could setup due-dates on tickets and setup Jira dashboards to make all of this stuff very straightforward to manage.
I think the problem is that since nobody actually works from Jira, they just get things thrown at them verbally or via calendar nobody would get into the habit of checking their dashboards on a morning.
Another annoying thing is getting tickets sent to you with estimates already made (not made by a developer either) or with project schedules laid out before any estimation has been done at all.
We also have a pretty insane ticket backlog due to PM's not actually looking at their own projects and attempting to prune or even review the backlog. There have actually been cases where client work totally drops off the radar from the PM side and just never gets finished.
Am I working in an utterly dysfunctional shop or is this kind of crap just par for the course?1 -
Agile coach Agiling: We shouldn't need code reviews as long as there is pair programming.
Me Internally: bad code + bad code doesn't make good code :( -
Product Owner.
Not Product Liaison.
Not Product Buddy.
Not Product Suggester.
Own it. Bend it to your will. Make it better or sunset it and build it again. But don’t be a wet noodle and say “I’m just following orders”. You give the orders, you own it.3 -
My boss thinks we're "Agile" because we spend 30 minutes every day talking about what we did, what we're doing and discussing every single imaginable outcome of life.1
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The team in our office was forced to have, and I'm not kidding, TWO hours long agile meetings EVERY day. That's right, only 6 hours a day for work. Crazy managers
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My boss uses agile development so he doesn't has to think about use cases he wants to be covered by the application.
He's just throwing in a "design" (an image that is probably created with Paint) without any further specifications and inconsistent elements, let the developer work two days on it, see the outcome, complains why it's not how he wanted it to be and then starts thinking how the feature should be integrated in the app and notices that his "requirements" from the image could not provide any advantage or usage at all for the user of the application. Asking for clarification before starting to work just leads to spongy statements or silence when he notices that he didn't think through to the end.
Sad is that this has not happened only once but is usually the way a new feature is developed...1 -
I get to learn so many different things in DevRant, that I want to add it as my task in the Sprint Board
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We estimated out how long a new project was gonna take using story points. It wasn't too big and the estimate came out to two months. We discussed it and it seemed to be all good.
Later on someone pointed out a Quora question where my boss asked why it would take so long to develop such a project.
My boss trusts people on Quora more than his own employees.2 -
Trying to understand why do I have a course on Software Engineering which consists 80% of lectures on what Agile and Scrum mean.
Why can't we get to implement a project and work on agile as we go? 😐😣7 -
Reminder, include legal language in next project that says if we're using JIRA then we're using JIRA and not a thousand emails with requirements embedded in spreadsheets and PowerPoints.
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"agile" teams, changing scope, unrealistic deadlines, non-tech PMs...
So much fits into this category.2 -
I'm absolutely fuming why on earth would someone try to apply exactly all rules of a theoretical concept. I hate those so called "scrum masters". We can't apply all rules of agile we're not machines. There's real life and theory.1
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It's done. Agile has taken over my life. The other day I looked outside and thought, "As a user, I can stand on my lawn without my feet disappearing." And that's how I decided to mow my lawn.
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When agile is everywhere (including toilets). Do you want me to poop in agile way? 💩💩
What can be the agile way of shitting?
2 -
"you're the type of person that brings a chair to a stand up meeting".
No sir, you are incorrect.
I'm the type of person that creates a composer.json at the root of your node project to fuck with you -
Dual Core blasting on a friday morning... gotta love it. finished my sprint on time, now cleaning up.
1 -
I was brought into my new position as part of an transformation of waterfall to agile methodology.
We are now running 4 while projects and need to restart the remaining 29 projects using agile principles. The business management type people love agile, but somehow the people inside the current waterfall practices doesn't.
They are afraid their silo work will either expand or not exist thus making it hard to transform the company. Also the company have been subjected to the dead sea effect.
Therfore, the project that is currently in the space of transformation is making my blood boil because people just ain't passionate enough about software.
Either you craft software, or, well you sit and suckle other's money. People suckling should please grow up and start venturing beyond there cozy 9 to 5 and transform to be a professional software doer rather than a BA, DEV, IT GUY.
YOU BASTARDS GET A SHITLOAD OF MONEY AND DON'T DESERVE IT FOR THE EFFORT YOU BRING.
It is your software, own it, be proud of it. Read up to make it better. And as always, the people debugging your code can be a violent psychopath -
I'll be starting a new job soon, and I'm sure there will be a chance to implement some form of process for the dev team to use...
To Scrum or to Kanban?2 -
http://bit.ly/2fme7PU
Check out this article I wrote on Jekyll. There's a tutorial in progress there too :) Jekyll is a static site building framework that allows you to dynamically allocate headers, footers, etc. Change a header once and it updates across all pages. I have a tutorial in progress there too :)3 -
RAT. HOLE. FUCK.
The retrospective is not the time to develop features and designs. We have burnt 45 minutes of an already ludicrously long retro ( 3 hours ).
Too much coffee + this horse fucking shit is geeking me out.1 -
What do you guys think of my new album called Low Hanging Fruit:
- Screen Scraping
- Let's timebox this
- Personal development plan
- Embrace the prototype mindset
- Decision making progress
- I am 15 minutes late
- Let's take this offline3 -
Cargo cult programming at its finest. I need to build a separate project twice, and restart visual studio to get this one to work.
Why? No one knows anymore and there is not user story for "Unfuck the dev environment" so we're not allowed to spend time fixing it. -
"Standup" meetings are based on the assumption that standing up gets uncomfortable after a while. In our team however, the meetings are not getting any briefer, we are just getting fitter. Perhaps we should introduce some more uncomfortable position, such as jump-up-and-down daily scrums, or yoga daily scrums.5
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I hate project managers trying to stay relevant to a agile development methodology. Our PM doesn't care if we are working and providing value to the customer, only about checking off his Project check boxes.
tech lead CANCELS Monday stand-up becuase they cannot attend. and I work and status and update my tasks in or virtual task board. I forget to send a message mentioning I'll be kissing Tuesday standup. Then he sends me emails like the following sent to me, my manager, and my tech lead: "please remember to notify your team if you cannot attend the standup, and to send an agile status to the team. This is something that is required and not optional. We are trying to firm up all stories and tasks and need to hear a status. We are in week 1 of iteration 4.3. Thanks."
I'm coding and delivering value to the customer. Wtf are you doing dude? -
Demo driven development.
Fucking nightmare.
Did a simple search for TODO Statements in the code and almost fucking spilt my coffee.
And the best part, they will demo most of this in Sprint review as done.. WTF.
Done means "Ready to Release" not "Ready to Demo".2 -
I'm at that point where I want to lash out at our team for not finishing a sprint. I've been doing the scrum master/dev role for months now and each sprint is incomplete since we have started the agile way.
Most of my team members are seasoned senior devs and my team's downfall are caused by not acting as a team. I'm the youngest in the team and have been acting as a babysitter for them.3 -
We had our first "real" sprint planning yesterday. This was a very superficial planning session, as my manager is, by the looks of it, not to keen on the whole "new process thing". Probably because it's not his way of doing things... or simply more simply put - this way round means he'll need find some new ways to crawl up the CTOs ass!
So glad I'm leaving! -
New bossman is looking for KPIs.
We're an agile team who build a back end system for a large corporation. Specifically the system we build is used by the sales guys when they are putting through a sale. I have no idea where to start with KPIs.
Can't measure number of sales as that's down to the salesmen. Can't measure speed of sale as again that's down to the salesman and how much they chat.
Any ideas?8 -
Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: this won't work. Literally the documentation says what you did won't work once we move towards our end goal architecture.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: no. You need to solve underlying problem.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Me: please stahp
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
Me: WTF man do your fucking job
Scrum Master: stahp lowering our velocity
Me: wut? 😒2 -
I've lost sight of the minimum viable product. I've spent months making a product I have to redesign now.
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So my team (read: not the team at all) has decided that we are going to scrum. Someone ease tell me it's not as fucking tedious as it sounds. Sounds like it's just more meetings. Especially on this team which is actually already pretty agile. And the way our "certified scrum master" describes the retrospective sounds like it was designed by the type of shitlord PM that forces everyone to wear ugly t-shirts to the mandatory company barbecue for "team building". Please tell me he's just a terrible salesman.7
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We're an agile company - we follow agile principles. Why is it that I've spent the past week doing documentation then!!!1
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I find Scrum Masters useless. I'd rather have a developer replace them. Am I overseeing their value? Could someone enlighten me?
I also think that if a group comprised of smart people, things spontaneously happen without needing a handrail to walk along.4 -
Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.
Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days. -
My teammate doesn't understand that the quantity of lines/method that he does in one commit nor the number of commits he does in one day translate directly into the quality of his commits.2
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We have decent linting on our codebase which covers off code quality and style.
We also have a developer who insists on making code reviews about formatting and spacing rather than functionality even tho we've tried in multiple ways to say:
- our linting covers it, if that's happy we should be (and the rest of the team is)
- it's a waste of time doing it
- it wastes the time of the team reading it
- the noise it generates makes it hard to see any legit comments
I swear to god if I see another comment saying "new line" i will scream. -
The company i work for is getting into scrum. Hired consultants, product owners and scrum masters. First action was 'lets spend 2 days in meetings estimating the rest of the project'.
Agile as fuck3 -
The customer wants to drop Agile in favor of their in-house development methodology. They just sent an e-mail describing it...
I think my team needs a room decorated with cotton flowers and small huts to get into the right mindset.1 -
Our team moved to scrum a while back. But everybody still does story point estimation by mentally assigning 1 story point for each day of work it would require. :/
On top of that, management compares the performance of two *different* scrum teams based on the story points they finish in a sprint. :// -
Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.
My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome. -
did little coding today... Spent most of my time learning Agile with Scrum. Suddenly so much of what went on in the 'Silicon Valley' tv show began to make sense. Jared [Donald] was a shrewd businessman.
resting now... Business & tech fascinate me. Perhaps there is still hope for this high-school dropout afterall! -
I suppose to be on leave after few hours... The team leader added five task to my sprint tasks... No wonder...
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In organised "standup" where people either offer nothing or try to clear up an issue with someone mid way through.. 'nuff said.
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What is your opinion on Agile?
I was studying through my textbook for a test tomorrow and the Agile Philosophy section sounded like a Team Rocket manifesto at some parts:
Responding to change over following a plan
Individuals and Interactions over processes and tooks
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.4 -
I really hate all kinds of tattle that sweeps the hallways of corporations, the gossip behind one's back, BUT this colleague of mine starts pissing me off. Recently joined that team where he should support us getting the Agile thing going. And he can go on for hours of how it should go and how flawlessly it worked in his previous company - all that needless meta talk - so much that a team member jokingly even said: yeah, shut up asshole. But he is all talk. When the name of a library was dropped his experience in using it went to upstream patches. His Linux experience lets us speechless. He is so convincing, I'm even doubting my accusations. Yet his only contribution in code wouldn't show and other team member wasted hours upon hours to recompile plugins to show that shit. Man, just leave us alone watching your youtube live-streams so we can get the shit done.
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I had a gentleman tell me I was overqualified, and then proceed to ask me for help with Agile software (jira)! 😂 I gave him my card!
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Why the hell do some teams use story points on bugs? I mean, there's a reason why they're called STORY points 😯
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I hate surprises.
I join office after a short leave and the other guy is out with a completely new product I have no clue of. (surprise 1)
Next, he's on leave and now I'm asked to fix bugs.(surprise 2)
Just for the curious, I ended up successfully fixing them and adding 2 features. -
My team decided to do a MOB programming in one of our tickets.
New joiner: Perfect we did a mob yesterday .
Me: Great, that's good. How did it go?
New joiner: Well, we work together in the gaming room next to each other and trying to solve the issue. I think it's very productive.
Me: Awesome! Let's do it again today... When we started the MOB, all of them are using their own laptop. And I was like.. so, this is how you did the MOB yesterday?
New guy: Yes.
Me: This is not a MOB programming... MOB programming uses only 1 screen, 1 driver and everyone work together, will tell the driver what to do, we need to exchange the driver every 10 to 15 minutes, everyone can be a driver. (devs, qa, ux, product) and do a retro after.
New guy: ah.. wow! Interesting.3 -
So, our project is making the transition to the cutting edge Agile methodology (hello, 2005 called).
From what I see, I'm starting to believe that we're also changing our target from delieverin software to deleivering meeting botes and meeting preparation docs.6 -
How does one get experience on working in teams if every project I've built has been solo because of a lack of developers from where I am from?4
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The one single time i succesfully remember my dream from the previous night it just had to be being in chased through a spooky building by this weeks sprint.2
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In a sprint planning meeting. Getting frustrated. I guess it's my fault. I guess I assumed that attending the same schedule meeting each week meant that we all knew when everything was due. My bad.
Seriously, I fucking hate systems people sometimes. We have 4 major tasks coming down the pipe, but they are scheduled in such a way in which they are staggered. But they want to punt the 1 of the 4 that is fucking done because it is going to cause a lot of testing, but the other three aren't coming til end of next month AT LEAST. So they want to stick their thumbs up their ass holes and wait to test the other three before testing the one that, again, IS FUCKING DONE!!! Are they worried that a super massive black hole will spontaneously form in earth's orbit and cause time to run backwards and somehow cause December to happen in October!?!?
No wonder systems is so fucking far behind. They can't see the forest for the trees. They're so big picture that months and years are at the same level of granularity. Fucking hell how is scrum better than our current agile process again? Besides the fact that it makes me attend more useless meetings and get more angry.
They are punishing the left hand for the actions of the right. Systems wasn't doing their job so now software has to slow down and miss schedule.2 -
"We follow the AGILE methodology."
A fancy way to say :
- We mostly work on tight deadlines.
- We will come with last second changes.
- We have little/no overtime payement policies.
- We will ask you to do basically anything even if you said explicitly that you don't know how to do it.2 -
Worked with two different customers
(customer 1 is up to date because of active development and customer 2 got his update long ago)
Changed something for customer 1 and accidently pulled customer 2. 49 changesets (needs a db update probably). Rolledback and now keeping an eye on the error logs -
I know your code is great and that you learned about scrum a month ago. But I didn't know the scrum training had to say you don't assign yourself tasks, mark them as done and be surprised when other team members haven't done them, two minutes to five the day before a national holiday (yesterday).
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Yes I know that's too many points this sprint.
I understand you have to have all the things.
No I can't move the stories out bc you gave us a hard deadline for the release. -
I hate so much all those sprint related meetings. They literally take one day totalled (every 2 weeks).
Review, dry run demo, actual demo, planning, daily hourly meetings.... so much talking.8 -
True story: We had once a project where the manager tells the client we are using the Waterfall but internally the devs are actually doing Agile. >_<1
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just a little pool here, do you, yes, you, do you think an inexperienced intern should take an epic story?
(not that there we work with agile, that would be great, but it's a task equivalent to an epic.)2 -
CS teacher: "I want you to do this project using DSDM. Every member needs to be appointed a role that is best suited to their abilities."
He has never heard of Agile.1 -
If you're always too busy doing the wrong things the wrong way, you will never have time time to do things right
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Sometimes a poorly planned project makes coding a lot harder especially if features and UI/UX always changes 😭
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In my previous agile sprint I somehow completed my task before the halfway, that's why I got less buffer time and point in this sprint.
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Is there anyone out there who uses absolutely everything JIRA has to offer? I've worked with it since starting my career and I still find it a massive fucking overkill.
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We all know that one guy at work that explains and overshare stuff using a lot of jargons for the sake of using jargons at the daily scrum. Then it turns out, he's ranting about something so trivial, basically wasted a lot of time. And don't get started on meetings. Oh god. Please send help.1
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Honest question, if you work in an agile environment, do you prefer story points or counting of hours to gauge tasks?4
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I spent 2 hours in an agile workshop with the "I do not think it means, what you think it means" guy.
When finished I could swear that if you asked the people what is agile, they would start crying. -
Community Question:
I'm on a lone-project for work. That means I have to make a design plan and documentation. I have zero experience with this, anybody know a good example on the web of either of these? Much appreciated!2 -
Today, I found a bad bug. I fixed it and tried to understand what happened there. Story description was ok, dev was done on time, review performed (1/3 of the time needed to developed), testers were happy: story was DONE.
I feel uneasy as all protocols had been respected, and still, the code was bad and features were broken :( -
In the last three days our team has had 4 people who were the final decider on priority for a single project.
Im staying here until my contract has ended but then I will tell my company they can find a new project for me...1 -
I'm a scrum sprinter using my agile-ity to dodge rock-rigid waterfalls.
My take at another lame joke.
But I still have my legs and can walk... -
every fucking time when the product owners start talking absolute shit that you have no idea and you would never need to know or listen to.
ITS A WASTE OF MY FUCKING TIME. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND TAKE IT OFFLINE. -
Just sat the shittiest exam of my life yesterday. It involved among other things: TDD with java (on paper), critiquing and rewriting gherkin scenarios, and diagnosing problems with agile teams based on a limited description. I was short for time at the end and chose not to answer some questions because it would tire my hand too much to attempt them, and it's time consuming af to edit stuff you wrote down.
Many other exams are switching to online tests, and this one really could have benefited from that given the sheer volume of crap I had to write down.
I'm basically hoping to God that I didn't fail this thing, but the lowest exam grade I've had so far is 70 so it would be crazy if I did. Still, fuck these people for writing such a difficult exam. -
We are in a course for the scrum certifiaction. Most of my partners are more concerned about they can't take the decission about using scrum or not. Is so sad because os a really small organization.
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Working with non-existing specs. Just have to pick a guess what arguments and columns that will be needed. Right now it feels like I'm up to a very fuzzy task, that will need to be done over and over again until it gets right, instead of doing it right once and for all. If this is agile, then agile is a waste of time!6
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we have been working... we swear...
this is right at the end of a project which was artificially extended because the review process wasn't setup in time. we've had to do certain things the product owners way, whilst shaking our heads and this useful chart is one of the side effects. sidenote, product owner is looking at this chart and showing it to higher ups, trying to show progress being made... i give up.
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Yesterday, I attended a seminar about agile methods, Agile Islands. I attended it last year too, and have previously attended more or less evangelist lectures about agile so my expectations were frankly not that high. But, I have to say...WOW! Now I finally get what agile is all about! The reason that I haven't been convinced until now is that we've been doing it all wrong :)3
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scaled agile day long planning meetings sitting around watching other teams point their pointables.
1 -
Once upon a time I worked for a startup in school as one of two developers.
I learned many technologies in this role. I built massive front end systems, debugged back end systems. They even gave me a little section on their site that was all about me and giving me credit for me work. The only actual employee was the "CEO, owner, and designer". A team of three in total.
Inevitably the company went under but the site remains. A skeleton of a dead dream. The CEO took my name and info off their website and took credit for all the work I put months into. I was never paid, never giving any recognition whatsoever for the work I did.
I'm not looking for an award or anything like that, but like bro?!?? I built your companies interface for free and you throw me out like trash.
Wtf is being a developer?!?4 -
Why do they demand 12-month goals when we use Agile Methodologies?
If we do it right, we don't know what we are working on next sprint, let alone 12 months.
Our goals are to work on the highest priority stories. We are not to work on stuff "in the background", so how can we have any long-term goals?
The only things we can plan are outside of our actual jobs (like conferences, training, pilot programs/hackathon projects, etc.) So the only things we can review at the end of the year are not the most important things we do.
Poor managers love numbers and checklists to hide behind.2 -
When a co worker pretends to work all day by "fixing" something that you've already fixed. Just so that they have something to talk about at stand up in the morning.
Git commit -nothing 🙄 -
The waterfall model of executing agile: Planning phase -- how to execute agile?
The loudest voices are often the people who contribute much else.
How many of these meetings have you been witness to ? -
When a developer refers to everyone on the team as family and you're thinking the complete & total opposite.
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!rant
Agile devs— do you attend sprint planning?
I want to, but my boss told me not to go (waste of my time, he says). Only leads attend them, then they come back with tickets for the rest of the team. But a few other devs I’ve spoken to found that absurd, since attending lets you choose your tickets to a certain extent.
Do you attend yours? Is it crazy not to? Am I missing out? (I ask bc ours is happening right now— and it’s so empty in here!)5 -
The Sprint started and this Stupid Lady did not finish her work yet and I am stuck till that. Funniest part is figuring out what to tell in the Daily Stand Up. ' Going through the Code and getting Familiar' :P
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Who still use Trello as Kanban and why don’t you change to an another (better) system?
And if you use a specific system, what is it?
My team work with Trello since the beginning. But as the team grows, it become impossible to say organize with a such simple system as Trello.5 -
!rant
Use BitBucket Cards to manage your issues as a Scrum Board. It makes your life way easier!
http://www.bitbucketcards.com/
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