Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".

Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!

Reviewing the code of my then new CTO, who said "I can also code and have experience in Java" - 50 lines of code, I added over 30 comments to his Pull Request. In the end, I rewrote his complete code.

Originally I'm coming from Java , about 2 years ago, I switched Node with TypeScript and had a hard time getting accustomed to Promises. It was a big relief when I learned about async/await. Much cleaner code, no brainfuck anymore when thinking about how to handle stuff that requires multiple async values and so on.

Now I'm working on a clients project as a Java dev again. SOA, Spring Framework, Kafka and MongoDB, nothing too complicated... if they wouldn't use reactor to bring reactive functionalities to Java.

It feels like I'm back in Promise Hell...

Had to extend the platform of a customer. For one part of my task (generating an encrypted string) there already was a class with encryption and decryption methods. This class is used in a gazillion places all over the code, so I thought it might be a good idea to re-use already existing stuff... Until I saw that the encryption method using basic Java methods (all fine with that) wrapped in a try-catch block, 'cause the Java methods may throw, returning err.getMessage() in the catch block...

Yeah...sure...makes sense... Instead of throwing an error or returning null just remove the possibility to handle the error.

So I decided to basically copy the methods and return null so I can work with that.
Created a merge request and was told by another dev of that company to remove my own impelemtation of the encryption method and use the already existing. Arguing that I won't have a possibility to prevent my code, that returns an URI containing the encrypted string, from generating something like "http://..../Encryption failed because of null" without success.

So I had to use the already existing crappy code...

Deploying on friday...

Found this today...

Yesterday, I had to set up a demo environment for a project, we are working on.
Everything was okay, frontend loaded, connection to backend is working, database is connected.
10 minutes before I wanted to leave for my well deserved weekend, PO came over: "I can't play any video, I uploaded"
Okay, couldn't be a big issue, it worked when I added this functionality 3 weeks ago, just before my holidays.
A bit under pressure, my girlfriend Was already waiting downstairs, I inspected the database and realized that a table Was not properly filled.
Checked the backend and everything seems fine, so checked the requests from the frontend and realized that the request was almost empty.
So some code, building the request body had to be wrong.
Already 10 minutes late, with a lightly annoyed girlfriend waiting for me, I found the issue but couldn't recognize that I wrote these few lines. A quick check of the git history showed, that my colleage changed my code during my holidays, so I just reverted everything.
After commit and deployment, I called my colleage and told him that I just reverted his changes.
"But now my feature is not working anymore, I had to change it like this!" he answered. I just responded that we will talk about that on monday and look at it together. While I hurried down the stairs, I was thinking why the hell somebody just changes stuff without checking if it affects other functionalities?
This should be basic knowledge for every dev, that if you change existing, working code to make it work with your feature, you have to ensure to not brake anything.
If you can't do that, then create a new function to handle your shit.

In the end, my girlfriend had to wait 30 minutes, because of 4 lines of codes, someone just changed without thinking what else could happen...

My co-worker, still studying but working as a "senior dev", just decided that we don't need a test/staging environment anymore. We just "validate" (we also don't use the word "test" anymore) newly created features in production.

Makes absolutely sense...

Thank god I have a new job from february on!

Just looking at code, my colleague ("Senior Java Developer"), wrote...

if (process == "null") {...}

As you can guess, process is a String.

I just don't know what I can tell him. It's just so wrong, in every possible way...

Thanks @dfox and @trogus
The finally arrived :)

Meetings I have to attend without any useful result or decision

Management had the idea to have a hackathon on saturday. Everybody should gather ideas what to do on this day, but top priority is to have fun.

In the end, management decided that we should work on tasks from our backlog.

Yeah... unpaid work on saturday... sounds like fun