I've been a professional software developer for almost 35 years and I've always been terrible at estimating. Unless the task is an almost exact duplication of something you've done before, estimation is guess work. Making developers commit to guesses can be very stressful in the scrum/sprint setting. It can be even more stressful if management is tying performance measurements to those tasks. I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. I wonder how many people here just finished their sprint planning meeting this morning and are here taking a quick break before diving into the work. 😄
Daily Stand-ups with Engg Managers attending them adds to the daily stress. As per Scrum ideology, EM shouldn't be a Scrum Master, but in almost all companies, EMs do attend. So, they don't just attend it, but question each developer on the work done and ask by when can it be completed. This daily update on Status with EM leads to HUGE STRESS.
Agile is just compressed waterfall, companies want to squeeze maximum results in minimum time. This situation rewards dirty code and causes technical debt for the future developers to clean up the mess.
Agile is propaganda process created by corporates cleverly saying it is a benefit to developers but in reality it is about to extract maximum benefit from employees in as less time as possible and pay them peanuts in return. Agile sprints used to be 3 week , now I have seen 1 week sprints leading to toxic cultures.
No no not that far. I agree on most of this agruments but The biggest reason Agile became populer was the quick requirement changes that water fall could not fulfill. It is not about trying geting more from devs. Think about a project takes 1 to 2 year to finish but many things changed before releasing your software. A rapid change in the IT industry and product expectation made Agile a mandotory option. Noone want to wait years to see new features.
I refuse to do daily standups anymore, it feels so demeaning having to tell your status everyday while the PMs and other micro managers are just smirking.
my scrum master understands nothing about technology, but we have to update on the technical implementation and impediments to him daily.. IT industry has become such a comical industry now a days
For me, it has become stressful because nature of software development has become 80% meetings/plannings around functionality etc and only 20% coding. And worse, it’s the other 80% that is given weightage by superiors, when evaluating your performance. I work in a big company where my product is divided between 7-8 scrum teams. When there is a tiny enhancement, all 7-8 teams need to get together to decide the work, dependencies, etc. “If we change the response of our API, how will it impact downstream code (owned by a different scrum team)?”. Product owners can’t coordinate that, so it comes down to developers to meet developers of other team, discussing code etc. Most of the effort goes into all this coordination. And sometimes I wonder - “I might as well transition into management side of if I have to spend 80% of my time just coordinating things”
It’s far more important to embrace the spirit of Agile than be dogmatic about the process and ceremonies. We switched to a customized Scrumban, which has drastically reduced the meeting and planning overheads. We have twice a week standup, which sometimes double up as retrospectives or planning sessions, and monthly releases. The team now has longer focus periods and are able to catch a breath after every increments.
Hi Kaushik!..At the end prdouct needs to delivered which can be used by customers. It does not matter whether its achieved by agile or waterfall. Based on my experience, going too much into agile rulebook is not helpful. It has to be combination of basic industry process and engineering efforts. If eng are working too much on meanigless tickets in each sprint which does not add value to product but just bloats their velocity, it will bite org in future and then they go for lay-offs which I have witnessed in orgs I worked.
Very true whatever is said here. Estimation is guesstimate only. Most of the time you either underestimate or over estimate, at least that is my experience. Score creep is very common where I work. Always make adjustment just to get it done. Then follow up stories in following sprint to make it right or much later. Total agile may be hahaha
Estimates indeed at best case, are educated guess-makings. I think we need countdowns instead of deadlines. However, those countdowns should be pause'able as much as we need to. Or any impediment should therefore automatically shift a deadline forward, along with tasks depending to it. This way deadlines of sprints can have their unique boundaries that are dynamic/adaptive enough to offset those periods of stress. This is the ideal and naive one of course. But in general, there are three tradeoffs; that are quality, pace and the scope of the delivery. I guess, for less stress, best one to sacrifice is the scope. We mostly have stress not because we're asked to deliver something quick or in a good quality. The problem most of the times is keeping this standard for a scope that cannot fit into the overall period of a project.
We tried Kanban and my devs were getting lazy as there is no immediate goal or milestone. There is a rush close to release. With scrum we have milestones and we only take work that we are comfortable and this is aligned with what goes into release. So no stress.
In agile we have a concept like Tech Spike or POC. For stories like this we should have some buffer developers to work on these stories were we don't follow agile framework. And in case the amount of tech spike or POC items cross 50-60% percent of total items then we should stop following sprint.
I personally had far less stress in a Scrum project with continuous integration and good test coverage on different levels, than a Kanban project with no deployment pipelines and barely any, flaky e2e tests 🤷♀️
I think incremental waterfall with small increments of about a month are better than sprint.. anyway very few follow scrum by definition as give by inventors ..
It's worse sometimes. Managers often have a "number" in their mind based on staffing, timeline and PAT. They then force us to bring our estimates closer to theirs. Its become "guess the number in my mind"
Even when you estimate again and again for similar work, the next estimate should be only 80% of hours estimated earlier due to familiarity of the problem.
Thanks for your videos, I have learnt a lot from you and been able to survive so long. With Scrum and in general everything else going on, Life is full of Multiple Micro Aggressions. The pressure is also from dealing with kids and all the other expectations of life and also daily standup. Also for an expert like you may be job is guaranteed but for most of the average folks they have no idea for how long they will have a job before it's sent to India or AI will take over it in next 3-5 years.
Yep, daily standup are another major source of stress in many companies. Sometimes it's like you are judged everyday for your work. Also, in the corporate world, no one's job is guaranteed.
Agile is for the company not for the developer, and the funny thing is everybody else just play the role of passing information to developers, SM, POs, BA, the developers bear the load of delivering, and the onus is always on the developers. It is just a circus for "PPT makers" to feel more important, while the developers carry the load of developing, testing, deploying etc. "Hey here's an idea, let's reduce time to market by bringing in slavery"
@Java.Brains Great video, hate scrum, pointless meetings giving mico updates satisfying no one but the top management. It would be useful to create another video on pull request politics...
Upper Management wastes a lot of time in useless meetings and ceremonies and leaves way less time to develop code. Every developer feels like a software coolie delivering micro updates everyday.
Very assumptions that every week or couple of week an individual will have same level of peaceful mental state or work freshness and hence same productivity (mechanically) is just unnatural. World need to understand burnouts is real thing. This simply makes mechanic sprints simply unnatural and unsustainable. Add to that a boring work of bug fix and people will not have any option but to switch the organisation. 😂
I don’t think scrum itself is the problem, rather bad scrum masters or improper scrum implementation that have managers constantly pressuring developers rather than letting them work.
- Agile liberal crap - Working on liberal crap project, without learning some from it - Liberal developers which think they work in administration, 9 to 5
AI doesn't mean you are done, but it does mean that less people will be needed. Guys like Kaushik will be able to do 3-4 people's job as they know how to design the code and then ChatGPT etc will write boiler plate code for them which will save lot of time for Senior Engineers. It's the entry level folks whose jobs will diminish in the beginning. Don't underestimate AI and not everyone who talks about it is a Monkey.
Holy shit dude.. You aged a lot in 10 years.
I blame scrum for this 😜
@@Java.Brains 🤣
If it ain’t scrum, it would be something else that ages you.
Scrum has just become a fancy name for "micro-management"
Incorrect scrum implementations*
Agreed 👍😊
True
I actually lost a contract because I dragged in tickets from backlog (didnt have anything to do), that screwed up my managers "velocity".
@@mdesnica that's just a bad manager, not a fault of scrum itself
I've been a professional software developer for almost 35 years and I've always been terrible at estimating. Unless the task is an almost exact duplication of something you've done before, estimation is guess work. Making developers commit to guesses can be very stressful in the scrum/sprint setting. It can be even more stressful if management is tying performance measurements to those tasks. I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. I wonder how many people here just finished their sprint planning meeting this morning and are here taking a quick break before diving into the work. 😄
i will teach you, just overestimate everything. you will be freat estimator
Daily Stand-ups with Engg Managers attending them adds to the daily stress.
As per Scrum ideology, EM shouldn't be a Scrum Master, but in almost all companies, EMs do attend. So, they don't just attend it, but question each developer on the work done and ask by when can it be completed. This daily update on Status with EM leads to HUGE STRESS.
Agile is the process which improves productivity of weak employee and sucks productivity from high performing employee.
Agile is not a process, the very moment we define it as a process we go against the very purpose the original manifesto
Agile is just compressed waterfall, companies want to squeeze maximum results in minimum time. This situation rewards dirty code and causes technical debt for the future developers to clean up the mess.
Agile is propaganda process created by corporates cleverly saying it is a benefit to developers but in reality it is about to extract maximum benefit from employees in as less time as possible and pay them peanuts in return. Agile sprints used to be 3 week , now I have seen 1 week sprints leading to toxic cultures.
No no not that far. I agree on most of this agruments but The biggest reason Agile became populer was the quick requirement changes that water fall could not fulfill. It is not about trying geting more from devs. Think about a project takes 1 to 2 year to finish but many things changed before releasing your software. A rapid change in the IT industry and product expectation made Agile a mandotory option. Noone want to wait years to see new features.
I refuse to do daily standups anymore, it feels so demeaning having to tell your status everyday while the PMs and other micro managers are just smirking.
my scrum master understands nothing about technology, but we have to update on the technical implementation and impediments to him daily.. IT industry has become such a comical industry now a days
Totally agree. And more - over 90% people in IT teams not having skills,
knowledge.
My teammate completes the task before finalizing the story itself 😂. Most of the time , either the story gets completely changed or discarded.
There is nothing agile about agile. You say estimate they call it a binding agreement
For me, it has become stressful because nature of software development has become 80% meetings/plannings around functionality etc and only 20% coding.
And worse, it’s the other 80% that is given weightage by superiors, when evaluating your performance.
I work in a big company where my product is divided between 7-8 scrum teams. When there is a tiny enhancement, all 7-8 teams need to get together to decide the work, dependencies, etc.
“If we change the response of our API, how will it impact downstream code (owned by a different scrum team)?”. Product owners can’t coordinate that, so it comes down to developers to meet developers of other team, discussing code etc.
Most of the effort goes into all this coordination.
And sometimes I wonder - “I might as well transition into management side of if I have to spend 80% of my time just coordinating things”
It’s far more important to embrace the spirit of Agile than be dogmatic about the process and ceremonies. We switched to a customized Scrumban, which has drastically reduced the meeting and planning overheads. We have twice a week standup, which sometimes double up as retrospectives or planning sessions, and monthly releases. The team now has longer focus periods and are able to catch a breath after every increments.
Hi Kaushik!..At the end prdouct needs to delivered which can be used by customers. It does not matter whether its achieved by agile or waterfall. Based on my experience, going too much into agile rulebook is not helpful. It has to be combination of basic industry process and engineering efforts. If eng are working too much on meanigless tickets in each sprint which does not add value to product but just bloats their velocity, it will bite org in future and then they go for lay-offs which I have witnessed in orgs I worked.
cloud providers push the community to adopt many things and sometimes for no good reason, it is just for profitability..
generally speaking, why projects need deadline time? who decides the deadline? On what criteria we set the deadlines?
Very true whatever is said here. Estimation is guesstimate only. Most of the time you either underestimate or over estimate, at least that is my experience. Score creep is very common where I work. Always make adjustment just to get it done. Then follow up stories in following sprint to make it right or much later. Total agile may be hahaha
I was like you then I realised it's just a job and I will be fired or tell them to stick it at some point. It's not worth my health.
Really love your videos ... Good and high quality
Glad you like them!
Estimates indeed at best case, are educated guess-makings. I think we need countdowns instead of deadlines. However, those countdowns should be pause'able as much as we need to. Or any impediment should therefore automatically shift a deadline forward, along with tasks depending to it. This way deadlines of sprints can have their unique boundaries that are dynamic/adaptive enough to offset those periods of stress. This is the ideal and naive one of course.
But in general, there are three tradeoffs; that are quality, pace and the scope of the delivery. I guess, for less stress, best one to sacrifice is the scope. We mostly have stress not because we're asked to deliver something quick or in a good quality. The problem most of the times is keeping this standard for a scope that cannot fit into the overall period of a project.
We tried Kanban and my devs were getting lazy as there is no immediate goal or milestone. There is a rush close to release.
With scrum we have milestones and we only take work that we are comfortable and this is aligned with what goes into release. So no stress.
In agile we have a concept like Tech Spike or POC. For stories like this we should have some buffer developers to work on these stories were we don't follow agile framework.
And in case the amount of tech spike or POC items cross 50-60% percent of total items then we should stop following sprint.
Hey Kaushik, can you please make video on discussing about AI future. Is it really going to replace the programmers or its a hype.
I personally had far less stress in a Scrum project with continuous integration and good test coverage on different levels, than a Kanban project with no deployment pipelines and barely any, flaky e2e tests 🤷♀️
I think incremental waterfall with small increments of about a month are better than sprint.. anyway very few follow scrum by definition as give by inventors ..
Most people design outside sprint which is not acceptable by definition.. in 2 weeks only development and unit/integration testing takes place ..
It was always stressful.
Only difference - the system finally catch up with us and now we are drained to the limit.
It's worse sometimes. Managers often have a "number" in their mind based on staffing, timeline and PAT. They then force us to bring our estimates closer to theirs. Its become "guess the number in my mind"
Exactly I was thinking same ❤
Even when you estimate again and again for similar work, the next estimate should be only 80% of hours estimated earlier due to familiarity of the problem.
Agile framework is an oxymoron, framework is a set of steps and processes you need to follow, this isn't a very agile thing to do if you ask me
what is your next playlist ?
Going through Agile training in my org. And your video comes up 😅.. How so coincident?
Thanks for your videos, I have learnt a lot from you and been able to survive so long. With Scrum and in general everything else going on, Life is full of Multiple Micro Aggressions. The pressure is also from dealing with kids and all the other expectations of life and also daily standup. Also for an expert like you may be job is guaranteed but for most of the average folks they have no idea for how long they will have a job before it's sent to India or AI will take over it in next 3-5 years.
Yep, daily standup are another major source of stress in many companies. Sometimes it's like you are judged everyday for your work. Also, in the corporate world, no one's job is guaranteed.
We’ve always needed to be ready for change in this field
SAFe : Scale Agile Framework 😊
Agile is for the company not for the developer, and the funny thing is everybody else just play the role of passing information to developers, SM, POs, BA, the developers bear the load of delivering, and the onus is always on the developers. It is just a circus for "PPT makers" to feel more important, while the developers carry the load of developing, testing, deploying etc.
"Hey here's an idea, let's reduce time to market by bringing in slavery"
More sprin boot projects please 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
@Java.Brains Great video, hate scrum, pointless meetings giving mico updates satisfying no one but the top management. It would be useful to create another video on pull request politics...
Software building is like mining in olden days, hazardous
Good one
I think scrum has become waterfall these days. At last of release regression happens and hence changes scrum to waterfall
Upper Management wastes a lot of time in useless meetings and ceremonies and leaves way less time to develop code. Every developer feels like a software coolie delivering micro updates everyday.
Omnipresent...it's called agile
It just removes fun of writing and developing code. Just bull shit.
Very assumptions that every week or couple of week an individual will have same level of peaceful mental state or work freshness and hence same productivity (mechanically) is just unnatural. World need to understand burnouts is real thing. This simply makes mechanic sprints simply unnatural and unsustainable. Add to that a boring work of bug fix and people will not have any option but to switch the organisation. 😂
I don’t think scrum itself is the problem, rather bad scrum masters or improper scrum implementation that have managers constantly pressuring developers rather than letting them work.
Leetcode ruined the industry tbh
lol no
Generative AI is making it worse each day.
👍👌
- Agile liberal crap
- Working on liberal crap project, without learning some from it
- Liberal developers which think they work in administration, 9 to 5
plus every monkey out there saying youre done for because of ai .
We are not done, but _something_ is going to change because of AI. No one knows what it is yet! :)
AI doesn't mean you are done, but it does mean that less people will be needed. Guys like Kaushik will be able to do 3-4 people's job as they know how to design the code and then ChatGPT etc will write boiler plate code for them which will save lot of time for Senior Engineers. It's the entry level folks whose jobs will diminish in the beginning. Don't underestimate AI and not everyone who talks about it is a Monkey.
@@amitjain3323 no , they are .
@@1newme425 good for you .
Lol Scrum isnt it lol
Scrum sucks
Welcome to Capitalism
You say that as if standing in line all day hoping to get a loaf of bread isn't stressful.