IS THIS SOFTWARE DEV? | Prime Reacts
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
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Original: • Reality of Software De...
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We found that sprint planning is harmful not just because of how long the meetings can take, but because it makes devs feel like they aren't allowed to spend time on things they instinctively know are valuable but failed to explain in the moment of the meeting.
Man...this hits hard.
By the time I've managed to put together an explanation of the problem I'd like to address with all the background necessary, come up with well structured and convincing arguments as to why it's important, had the discussion with the team, figured out how to break it up in to tasks, decided who's going to take on each task and how we'll communicate about it, put together estimates for each task, created all the tickets....
...I could have fixed that problem and 5 others
holy crap you named it and now it's real
if only devs were disciplined enough to fill in their sprint with tasks from backlog we would not need sprint planning
@@yuriib5483 "IM IMPORTANT I HAVE INPUT HEY HEY HEY HOW ABOUT THIS HUH HUH HUH GOD HOW COULD YOU GET BY WITHOUT ME"
In my company it's not a feeling it's a command from the PO that you don't work on anything technical, even if you've already finished every "feature" ticket you had for that sprint, they command us to go fetch other "feature" tickets from future sprints if we run out of work, any technical improvement is low priority automatically and postponed for the very end of the iteration (a set of 6-8 sprints) if you've already completed every feature ticket you had by that point
If someone enters a ticket to fix some code debt it'll be in the backlog for at least a couple of months till someone can tackle it, some times it'll be a year till someone looks at it again
agile is a ploy at getting non technical people into the tech industry but not knowing how to code
they will pretend to know code with chatgpt soon
@@jel1951 chatgpt will replace them sooner than us hopefully
I had a PO once who ocasionally dabbled in Python scripting and so felt qualified to weigh in on how long tasks should take us. We deal with a complex web of microservices, mind you. He would often come and tell us "Hey, this task that is taking you so long. Look, I wrote this script here that does just that, and I did it in a day", and he proceeded to paste his 20 line script. Lord have mercy
Dude… we started working with a low code platform, OutSystems, because management wanted to spend less in developers and introduce „citizen developers“.
They hired a 50-60 years old person with no coding experience because they thought low code means anyone can develop apps.
Needless to say, I hate OutSystems and anything „low code / no code“.
@@Titere05 holy shit man, this so much, one of the worst situations you can be in is having anyone above you in the hierarchy that's less qualified and either too proud to see it or malicious enough to actively sabotage you as a result
If I have a 1 hour break between 2 meetings, I'll get absolutely 0 work done in that 1 hour. I need to be able to get in the flow and get my focus up, having distractions like that every once in a while breaks up my thinking process and gets me out of the flow. If you're gonna force me to be in some dumb meetings, please group them together to limit the number of distractions to the minimum. Same goes for useless slack messages, completely throws me off, I'm a god damn social media addict on rehab, it's already hard enough to stop myself from going on youtube every time i open a browser, but it's in my power to do it - useless meetings and getting spammed by irrelevant messages is something I cannot do anything about.
Get some help and stop complaining. It's your fault not everyone else.
Disable Slack alerts and respond to messages with a delay, once you went to get a snack or sth. Set up a range of times where you take meetings instead of getting them all day long. If this cannot be done, then maybe speak with your manager or sth
@@wiktorwektor123 have you considered that some people are more productive under different conditions? He's not blaming anyone and neither is he psychologically unwell for saying that certain things make it harder for him to be productive. Calm your tits.
@@wiktorwektor123 might as well say the same about half of prime's videos, "complaining about js being terrible? sounds like a you problem", it's a fundamentally wrong approach, plus what i described is not to my detriment, it's to the detriment of companies that adopt such practices
anyway, miałeś zły dzień że jesteś taki negatywny? xD jeśli na nic nie narzekasz to nie możesz oczekiwać żadnych pozytywnych zmian (+it's good fun to complain), nie jest to jednoznaczne z obwinianiem innym za swoje własne niedociągnięcia albo z poddawaniem się, ja znam swoje limity i jestem w stanie sobie z nimi poradzić, dzięki za troskę xD
Agile is designed to create tiktok brains.. who have adhd and absolutely zero concentration and attention span...
im currently self-learning... and reading some "best practices" of JS frameworks.. im like... why on earth would i split up code into so micro components... jumping one file to anothert all the time , i like Vue.. but im def not using best practice because they are dumb.
if i make Navbar, the navbar will be one file... not split it up like Nav,NavGroup,NavList,NavListItem... absolute idiocy.
Im better and reading 1000 lines of code, rather than jumping thru files like crazy dog on cocaine.. i dont have adhd or consume short-form content for years... i read books...
and thats how i prefer to read code too... obviously i split up things if it makes sense...
Sprints are trash. Sprint planning lets you know how much time you spent on planning.
best statement
I hate that people mix up agile and scrum. Sprint-based is the worst way to do agile
What about that part in sprint planning when somebody asks, "Wait, so what is this supposed to do?". How am I supposed to estimate this if it just says do X? What the hell is X?
@@JohnKerbaugh We still do some backlog refinement and tech discovery when needed
@@JeyPeyyI mean... Scrum is an implementation of agile, or an attempt of it
if your team actually talks to each other, you can pretty much throw away 90% of "agile" things.
but that's what the actual "agile" stood for, just frequent communication with other technical members, but it got corporatized
Agile is a replacement for actual management by actual managers doing their actual job.
@@LagMasterSam if it replaces hover managers in that company then it's a good start.
@@LagMasterSam why are you wording that like thats a good thing. I'd rather have sprints/daily 5 minute bs agile meetings than having to report to some manager breathing down my neck at every turn
d^^D
That chad Indian teacher saved me in algorithms class
hah, he saves everyone as i have been told
what is his channel?
@em29 a same as his name, Abdul Bari
Abdul has saved everyone of us here 😂
edited comment == bunk.
this video made me feel a little coconut oily
edit: thank you so much prime, I gasped when I saw this, huge fan and will forever be thankful to you for being my inspiration to create content and become a better dev
My team is made entirely of engineers of different levels. Our workflow is kanban inspired. We use a kanban board, we have a daily meeting in the mornings, a weekly "backlog grooming" meeting where we flesh out upcoming work. Then there is a monthly retrospective. So far this has been my favourite team process that I've participated in.
Sounds dreamy.
@@GeneraluStelaru Yeah. Took a long time to get to this point, though (4+ years simplifying away from scrum). We used to have full-time scrum masters "supporting" the team. They were all nice people and meant well, but generally they just complicated things because they were so focused performing ceremonies.
We also benefit from being a very technical team involved in platform/infrastructure. So product managers don't get very close to us.
"My team is made entirely of engineers" - of course you don't need and don't use agile
@@tedchirvasiu We still need to plan what we are doing and still value the ability to know what work is in progress etc.
As an aside, if I remember correctly, the Agile tenants were proposed by a group of engineers. Scrum and kanban are just attempts at implementing agile.
@@Muaahaa Of course, but planning and communication between technical people is easier and smoother than between technical and non-technical people. An Agile team includes the non-technical people too.
And I don't mean it's easier because technical people are superior, just simply because there is no translation that has to happen between business logic and technical stuff.
So for instance if your team is developing a CLI tool and the team only consists of devs, things will naturally go smoother communication-wise than if your team is developing an accounting software which has to work in accordance to the laws of multiple countries.
In the second example the engineers also need to include accountants, lawyers, translators, because the knowledge needed to develop the said software goes beyond just computer science.
Dude, it's unbelievable. Those SCRUM guys don't even read their own process spec. 90% of the rituals are hallucinated 😂😂😂
I work in a really small company of 3/4 people and we all fully work from home. Every morning we have a standup that can last for 10 minutes where everyone is just talking about what they're doing/gonna do that day to an hour where we have to talk about stuff that involves all of us. Before we did these stand-ups i never really knew what everyone was working on at any time, but now i feel like everyone knows what's going on a lot better
I actually feel like I am getting a lot of value from these meetings and it made work a lot nicer.
I have a similar experience, I think it could be a lot more efficient from a meetings perspective but I've gotten tons of value from it
We started doing those meetings in text messages in slack. Each morning when we got to work we would write what we were gonna do this day, tag the people if it concerned them or you needed their input, and if needed a discussions would start in a thread under each message.
At the end of the work day each of us would write what was done. We would go on calls only if it was needed, for example you need help with something or if messaging would actually be slower. If we needed to do any meetings we would plan them first thing in the morning and get them out of the way, or move them to the end of the work day.
It was extremely productive environment. You would know what everyone was working on, after you read the messages in the morning you could give input on something that the other person didn't know and save them time, and throughout the day we would sync up through messages again, each in their own time so to not break focus. The team was in sync and very efficient.
We do something similar. A 10-30 minute standup every morning for 5 of us. I think it’s really helpful for everyone to have an idea what everyone else is working on. As a new hire, it has also let me get a good picture for how things work.
That's the ideal form of standup from my understanding. But once management gets involved it goes downhill. My company has a bloated dev team, manual testers, and ~3 manager-types all in standup. It's a miracle that we can keep it below 30 minutes. But at that point it's less about benefiting the devs and more about pleasing managers, sadly.
Also its quite Nice being able to talk about purerly dev things with someone, whats more efficient etc..
Scrum is literally opposite to what agile is supposed to be.
Agility: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”
Scrum: “lets design processes, and host of tools (Jira 💀) to increase development speed.”
agility: “Working software over comprehensive documentation”
Scrum: “Lets have people have to painstakingly document *what* are they doing, *why* are they doing it, and *how* are they doing it. Let’s also define stupid templates and rules about how all this documentation should be written, because they’ll work better if we have them writing in prose instead of bullet points.”
agility: “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”
Scrum:”Let’s create a figurehead (PO) so that *not a single developer* ever meets a client.”
agility: “Responding to change over following a plan”
Scrum: “Let’s create an artificial 2-3 weeks interval that will delay our ability to respond to changes, but will supposedly help us create metrics to *plan* the rest of the project”
The fact that people in management positions are shown the agile manifesto in trainings about Scrum and can’t see how the two can’t be more different is amazing.
"The Scrum Team [(Devs, PO, SM)] presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and progress toward the Product Goal is discussed." - Scrum Guide
"The Scrum Team [(Devs, PO, SM)] and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint." - Scrum Guide
-> communication between stakeholders and dev team is recommended!
Thank you @ondono for making this comment
Jesus! None of how you described scrum is anything like how scrum is described in the original source material for Scrum. If that has been your experience with what people are telling you what "scrum" is, then you have been lied to your whole career.
It's standard practice. Over my career I've seen the original OO analysis and design (in an iterative loop), then agile, both be adopted by companies that sell training (and crucially certification) - and its these people who seem to suck all the good ideas out in the interest of producing a standard process for development.
And we now know why the people who get into these positions get into these positions. They don't question. They mindlessly pretend to be busy.
10 years of agile. I'm like WTF is this? My kids plan their 2 weeks better.
4 years of it and I'm so over it now.
Yes, it's pretty spot on. Deep in the bowels of the scrum factory, strange smells of burnt oil and piles of ruined time everywhere.
everywhere
I used to work in a small team of 5 people and we had a manager who would once a week give us the goals and let us brainstorm for solutions. It wasn't perfect but I had leeway and could focus on my work.
Then the company went to "restructuring" and our team consisted of me and a front-dev. We got a new manager and unlike the previous one, he insisted on having dailys, writing tasks on jira (and subtasks to those tasks) for every single thing, even for things like reading documentation and writing confluences, all with time estimates (yes, even the subtasks)!
My productivity plummeted. I would work 30% of the time, 60% be on meetings and the rest to try to refresh and come back to work. Our new manager didn't know much about the system we were developing and I was the only one left who understood and maintained the code (the other guy worked only on the front-end) so I had hours of meetings where I'd explain to him everything over and over, all of this while we were supposed to work on productization. I was given tasks that I wasn't supposed to have that revolved around DevOps and permissions (which I naturally didn't have). Management would make decisions without any consultation with us and frequently change them because they weren't close enough to the source material.
To try to "balance" the work load between me and the front-dev, I was given front-end work with React and the other guy had to learn the whole backend and microservices. Code reviews were me explaining code rather than being reviewed. I felt like a tutor rather than an engineer and now I'm looking for a new job...
They failed you.
When you said, it was you explaining the code, at that point they should have promoted you, and hire someone else, so you can be the tech lead.
Actually you sound like you were doing much of the tech lead stuff, but without the payment of a tech lead and the authorization of a tech lead.
That sucks, I'm glad you're not there anymore, I hope you got a job already.
JQuery starting everything with a dollar sign, so prophetic.
Php knocks on the door…
SHOW ME THE MONEY 💰💰
My company does 5 meetings:
1. Backlog Refinement - are we building the right thing/what tickets do we need to build the right thing/how many points
2. Sprint Retro - talk about your feels
3. Sprint Review - demo work to stakeholders
4. Sprint Planning - Literally the same as backlog refinement except you get assigned the tickets
5. Standup - blab about blockers and stuff
In my experience Scrum meetings work the best on small teams. Having worked on a team of 30 Dev's, they basically were just a waste of time and all you were really listening for was your name to give your status update and they often lasted over 30 minutes. Questions rarely ever got answered and people rarely offered help. On my current team of 5 dev's theyre actually very productive and have saved our development team significant amounts of time.
True, meetings where everyone shares fundamentally don't scale. As soon as there's more going on on a team than everyone can mentally track or nobody is working on related tasks, it devolves into a frustrating time waster. Thankfully, my scrum meetings usually last 5-15 minutes because my current team is small and sane.
I don't think a team of 30 devs work well with literally anything lol.
that 30 people team should've been 6 or 7 teams instead
Well Scrum teams never meant to be big. Up to 10 people is max.
o.O 30 people ??? We ain't having so many. 4-8 people is the sweetspot. If it's less then 4 than just talk to each other no point in making specific meetings. If it's more then 8 you probably wasting the time of a lot of people as they can't contribute to the problem.
Step 1 to becoming a chad lead: get your food passed to you
facts
This is why I love my job. No manager standing over me, no meetings except once a week for an hour to discuss and show what we've done, and complete autonomy to do what we want. We have the mentality of you build it, you own it. We manage our own tickets in creating them as well as picking which ones to work on. We get to do it all. Add new features, fix bugs, etc. Front end and back end, doesn't matter, when we are working we do it all. Small team of 3, and it works beautifully. No micro management, no breathing down our necks, no hard deadlines or sprints. We have a Kansan board, but that's it. No scrum master, no daily stand ups. We are all experienced and are left to make our own choices on what we think is best. We get general direction like let's work on this new feature this year at some point but that's about it. So glad I don't have to deal with the BS of larger companies and red tape over best practices.
Scrum: Let's implement top down micromanagement in such a way that it is both maximally annoying and distracting, while being soul crushingly two-faced and hypocritical, while somehow also removing any possible strength of top down control by removing any responsibility from those up the chain to actually provide any written/formal planning so they can minimize their organizational responsibility.
My experience with agile was way worse on a large team. Now that work for small business which is understaffed agile actually makes sense. The meetings only work when people are on the same page. As soon as someone is behind it becomes a nightmare.
i can totally see this. i definitely think there is a continuum of agile and its goodness vs its badness
Agile is essentially for start-ups. Enterprise wan to be "on the edge" and sell their customers they are doing agile with CD/CI etc. And then they com up with monsters like SAFE. Enterprise never will be fully agile as they are not willing to change their structure with number of useless business overwhelming roles.
Even the name "agile" doesn't fit at that point; "agile" implies light and flexible, not exactly how one would describe a large team
@@nieczerwonySAFE is the absolute worst! Holy crap it's so bad!
@@thebluriam Yeah. It's f****g disaster.
When I was at Amazon I got absolutely bricked by meetings like this. The day was for discussing the work to be done at night 😞.
so every big tech companies are like this? Just saw that video on Primeagen channel about a guy who did 400k/year in Google, he mentioned only 2 meetings per week as I recall 🤔
The dr disrespect of the coding community 💯
For real, even looks like him
That one didn't age quite so well
@@patapon5960 lol bruh
Wait that's nowhere near enough meetings. I just took a look into my calendar and I have sprint planning, sprint review, prep for sprint review, sprint retrospective, backlog refinement, stand up, catch up with manager
cross team dependency meetings (actually occasionally useful), and technical refinement (which we sometimes skip if we don't have anything making it the most useful meeting). I will often end up putting less than half my day down as actual development. I could also probably 1.5x to 2x the amount of time spent in meetings if I didn't skip all the optional ones.
And don't even get me started on the multiple solid days of quarterly meetings that we just had.
aww, you guys don't use the phrase "grooming" instead of "backlog refinement" ? lol
Sprint planning is the dumbest thing. I hate the long meetings because someone always has to say something extra.
EVERY TIME
@@ThePrimeTimeagen then you have management that doesn't understand you're doing six other things. "How long do you think this is going to take?" I don't know Bob, about as long as I need it to take because I'm doing other shit too.
I work in a company where we do 100% remote work. We pretend to be in an office using a discord channel. And the truth is that for me, daily is very important. But not because it makes us more "agile" but because it is the closest thing to having a coffee with colleagues before starting to work. The most important benefit for me is that human interaction because (for better or worse) the whole team has become friends. So, it's nice. So... Many times it is just that, social interaction but when there is a blocker it is useful to discuss and plan how we are going to solve the problem. I understand that for some teams it's not a pleasant experience because they feel like they're wasting time or something like that. I guess it varies a lot depending on the values inculcated by the company where you work.
You don't need to go into an office to meet up with coworkers. You can have people over to your place or meet somewhere more interesting and accessible.
I feel the same way about daily scrums at my company.
Friends, or friendly?
Do you hang out in your free time voluntarily / non-job related? If so - that's nice, don't get me wrong. I just don't see being good acquaintances at work and being friends outside work as the same.
Very often workplace friends are not really your friends, it makes sense to be on friendly terms with them but very few will even keep in touch after you quit. I think having social interaction is great, but standup meetings are usually terrible because they're too formal and have a structure of a report, they're not a conversation. Instead, you can simply talk with your colleagues when having regular calls with them. If your team is small and your standup meeting is more of a catch-up, it's simply not a standup meeting.
@@DMSBrian24 Agree big time. Every second friday my team goes to the office and meet up. It's a bit more of an informal day, used for planning the next sprint and meetings with cross-cutting concerns (gamedev, so there's plenty of those).
Besides that, there's also just.. getting a coffee with people, asking if people want to go for a walk (if at office) or arranging breakfast together at the office and such things. Those all require intent and consent for the social nature of those arrangement. (can join breakfast just for a cup of coffee too!)
I'll not that I say consent not because I'm big on all the discussions around those these times, but because it just makes the situation a lot more natural, and people less misaligned on what the value of those meetings are. Sitting in meetings out of politeness is common, even when there's no reason for the person to stay around any longer, and so is people being frustrated about that over time. Some banter here and there doesn't hurt, but damnit sometimes you just want to get work done - and if a team of 5+ engineers all "sometimes" just want the meeting to be over to get work done, odds are, there'll be someone in nearly every meeting feeling like their time is being wasted.
I hate "proper" agile so hard. I was in a team were I was able to build a prototype with 2 colleagues in about 2 years which is now actually integrated in our core product. We planned stuff before of course, but in the sense of sponteanous calls to discuss the direction, defining basically stuff just on course grain story level and everybody was free to implement it how he wanted. All of us were ultra motivated and we pushed way beyond what should have been possible in this time. It was awesome, it was full of passion, it was fun, we did incredible progress too. We used of course our coding guidelines, code reviews and all the stuff which actually makes sense. Now we are integrated in a bigger team to transition our code to the core processes and end up having refinement meetings to discuss if a property's name abbreviation is justifyable or not and spend 15min on such a stupid topic with 7 people. And those meetings take up to 3h. It really hurts to work this way. It feels like I'm walking without feet
It's completely nonsensical.
At some point, they should just promote seniors so they can be the code reviewers and Pm/tech leads.
Agile makes no sense implemented that way, and a proper developer is able to make his own features in a maintainable way.
Reviewers and PM can give a direct feedback of why certain feature wasn't accepted.
It's really easy, to follow Kanban honestly, but some project managers are micromanager maniacs
I like stand ups. I like knowing what other people are doing in their work life. I don’t have any experience of people chit chatting about their private life in a standup. Sounds like a management problem
SCRUM killed 80% of my productivity and causes enormous stress for me. 80% ticket pushing and endless meetings.
It is frustrating as hell to do things that takes a team weeks while I could do it in only a week all alone.
It can take longer pushing projects across the production board than actually programming them. We estimate a project will take 12 hours. I do it in 2. Not a big deal, many people also do from time to time. It takes me 3 hours constantly maintaining my branch for others to test, review, test again, review again. Now let’s say I finish 6 projects. I’m now spending all day just getting latest. Dealing with maintaining shit. Programming my own projects at home is so comfy.
To avoid overengineering my code, I don't engineer it at all and just yolo
best part of planning is when you want the project to take half of time, you add another guy and it takes double the time :)))
nobody remembers the Mythical Man Month anymore, much less reads it
At my previous job I had 10 to 20 hours of meetings a week. God, I'm so glad I quit. We had two standups per day. TWO standups. I think I have a PTSD.
As engineering manager for about 6 years, I’ve learned to take simple approach of asking the Devs what they need and most my job is really dealing with the PM and upstream folks to not waste the devs time. Devs need clarity on business logic and priorities sometimes,but doesn’t require set in stone process or rituals. Usually when Devs “get” the requirements more fully they need very little from me. Velocity points, 2 week sprints, overly verbose Trello cards I’ve found don’t help output. Giving holistic view of what’s going on and then helping with specifics as needed does.
Well, that's because you are a manager who manages.
Agile sounds like a thing incompetent managers made up to make the developers compensate for their own inadequacies in management skills and their inability to interact with wide array of humans, requiring those humans to act as formalized drones that are more convenient to handle
We don't do agile at work but do have daily standups that usually last 10-20 mins, which usually i don't mind, people flag up what they're working on, if someone's stuck they explain the issue and 9 times out of 10 one of the more senior guys on the team jumps in and says hey i think i know what to do, let's call after meeting etc.
I think most people are doing agile wrong... it should not be a step-by-step guide of what to do, but rather like a template that is changed to fit the team's needs. Take what makes sense and works for the team, continually improve on it and ditch all the rest. In my current dev team, we gave up estimating tasks and planning sprints. We kept standups and retrospective meetings (1 per month) plus a bi-weekly catch-up meeting with the team lead. In addition, we also have a bi-weekly meeting with the product owner and other interested parties. All meetings (besides standup) are planned for up to 1h but can be shorter. And standups are for fucking relevant topics and up to 15 min! Talk about your cute dog after the official part, if anybody is interested...
agile IS wrong
Except whenever you say I don't want planning or standups or retrospectives or demos you get shut down
I think people are doing communism wrong. See, communism is not wrong, it is just that one have implemented real communism yet.
My understanding of Agile is that it's SUPPOSED to break down large work into sprint-sized featuring which can be reviewed to say "Yes we're on track" or "No what we're doing isn't working." In terms of product lifecycle it's basically a form of Cyclic Development where you're limiting your resource investment while you have low certainty on the value of what you're creating.
So... it follows that for anything which has high certainty or which already requires basically no resource investment, you shouldn't be using Agile. Instead, if it's high certainty you should be making the process standardized with time estimates so you know how many people are needed to get it done in X time period, and if it's low resource people should just go do it.
@@williamfish1407 Well yeah that's the problem, companies don't run it right.
it's like hearing that salads make you healthier, so you start eating salads with a bunch of fatty dressing on it. Then you don't lose any weight at all, but still love to tell people about how you're totally dieting and living healthy.
That's what they do with "agile" they love claiming the buzzword but hate actually implementing it properly.
I had a co-worker who explained that the value of agile is that it lets Management know what developers are working on, so when the Pointy-Haired guy comes in and says "I just had a brief idea! You should work on this!" or "Oh, crap, Production crashed, what do we do now?" You can say "I'm working on this; if you switch me to that, this will necessarily be delayed" -- so that developers don't get buried under features and bug fixes, all of which need to be done YESTERDAY!!!!!11!!111
You don't really need "agile" and certainly not "scrum" to do that -- but it kindof says something cynical about software development that something like "scrum" or "agile" is needed to manage these expectations.
this hits so close to home, like honestly i get excited when there is a critical big in prod or something cuz i get to do something unscripted and unmanaged in a milion meetings
geez... that hurts my soul to hear this! honestly, i love the mentality, the desire to do rather than to talk.
@@ThePrimeTimeagen yeah, like im a software engineer let me do the engineering mr. manager god damn it xD
This hits close to another thing that bothers me, that the more senior you are, the more bs you deal with and the less you code. It's like owning a football club and putting your best players to tend to the grass instead of playing. F**k that!
While my team lead was on holiday, I did away with estimation in plannings because it's useless for us. New requirements are added at least twice a week, changing the sprint scope, and my team doesn't really take estimation seriously (probably realized it's useless). So now we just look at the upccoming backlog and discuss what each task implies, so that everyone's on the same page. If a task seems too big we split it into subtasks. And that's it, no estimation effort other than splitting complex tasks. We're all happier for it, and we've been working exactly as we worked before, so the refactor was successful lol
Edit: Whether all tasks are finished or not by the end of the sprint has no impact on us, it doesn't matter as long as we hit the quarter objectives. I think kanban would be a better fit for us but corporate wants scrum because they read it was cool. We don't even do retros though
I work for a smaller company and one of the hardest things I encounted is estimates. Sometimes I will get very little information to work with and it's one of those things I will know once I get into it. Sometimes I feel like I am being asked how long it's going to take me to run this marathon but the length of the marathon is unknown. Usually it's a 20 mile run with an expected completion of 20 minutes (metaphor people... metaphor)
This has always been my issue with agile.. estimation is almost impossible to do when dealing with a relatively complex project
We have to connect to a new API from the team X. The team hasn't decided yet what the API does or why they are building it, but we will integrate it on our system, how much effort will it be?
Just overexaggerate your estimates. Imagine the worst case scenario and say x2 of that for a time estimate when asked. Usually you can say "I don't know" in smaller companies though.
@@adriangodoy4610 something like that lol. I can't be too specific due to contracts lol. Hell this post if seen by wrong person could get me fired maybe lololol
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 The Montgomery Scott method of project management. "How else are you going to keep your reputation as a miracle worker?"
If the team is mostly self-managed it’s a nice way of splitting up features which could potentially take months to finish. Also 3 week sprints seems like a nice balance. I also like standups.
that is fine,
long as there isn't a bunch of standups :)
at my last 2 jobs we'd play games.. sounds fun.. it's not
Our team does 2-week sprints and daily "stand ups", but the standsups are just in written form in a slack channel. Works very well.
We get a lot of leeway though - if something planned for one sprint turns out to take longer, it just takes longer. If something gets done faster, we don't dally around, we start working on what's preliminarily in our next sprint (or prioritize issues that have cropped up during the sprint).
Essentially, I guess we're really doing something best described as "2+2" sprints, where the first two weeks are well-laid out, and the second two weeks are less laid out, and then there's the backlog.. :)
3 week sprints sounds like it could be nice, but with its own challenges in coordination.
@@ThePrimeTimeagen I hate standups, too, and I'm in manufacturing... not a Developer lol (WIP... goals, dreams yadda-yadda). And that shit about the Dog? *Fucking, nailed it*. 15 minute mandatory meeting every day at the start of shift... just to listen to a 5 minute summary of two emails we've had for weeks repeated over and over again... then 10+ minutes of our Supe bitching about her kids, whining about how we make her look bad to her boss... or "subtly" bragging about her new benz.
A+
Agile literally advocates what you say is the best way to code - incremental progress, minimization of planning, elimination of processes etc. the problem is - no one actually does it. Scrum is the real issue here, it's an anti-pattern that attempts to make "agile" work in a more conventional business scenario by establishing new redundant, frustrating processes.
Working in a company with 25+ Devs on our warehouse management systems (controlling real warehouses) in C#.
We don't do agile. We got 2 meetings a week, between 20-40min to get updates on the progress of important stuff. Like the team currently working on the processes to handle goods that can't go on our automated conveyor system ect. because it's the next thing we are contractually obligated to finish (milestone). And only first in broad stokes, the people relevant to a more detailed discussion stay, the rest goes and does their job. Meetings are in MS Teams most of the time so you can do other stuff while listening.
We also only use a Kanban Board (Jira + Confluence + Azure) and tickets get primarily created by senior Devs, but everyone can create Tickets with stuff that has to get done if they notice something. And time estimations are suggestions and nobody cares basically.
I think this is a good compromise.
Periodic meetings are kind of fun.
Instead of doing any actual work you try to come up with an excuse of why the thing that should have taken 20 minutes of prompt engineering will now take 16 work hours and 15 "quick" meetings with other team members that will stretch to 2 hours each.
We do agile and we have sprint-planning, (no dailys) and a retrospective (30mins) every two weeks. We are a team of 8 and it works beautifully. It's a minimal implementation and allows us to take a step back every 2 weeks from the low level implementation and decide what bigger feature/improvement/maintenance etc we want to implement in the next sprint. It gives us organisation and direction. IMO you have to make Agile work for you and really be aware of the pitfalls. Our team performs better now with this version of Agile than it did before when we had very little structure.
I hate it.. so here is my workflow currently: sprint planning, daily standups, retro, and the cycle starts over.. so damn worhtless.
dang... so much
@@ThePrimeTimeagen tell me about it..
This vid could have been a 4 line mail.
i don't know what you guys are doing for sprint planning but it's just a 15 minute meeting we have every two weeks to make sure the work on our jira board is doable, 90 minutes a week in PBR, we have product managers in PBR for if we need them to clarify something, they don't have any input on estimates
Our team recently moved to Agile as our HOD just changed.
I am attaching 10x meetings, have 5x headache and doing 33% less of actual development work.
No planning, no grooming? Talk about living the good life. 😂
I'm the scrum MASTER! I plan the sprint contents ahead of time, assign tasks to appropriate engineers ahead of time, including estimating the time for each "thing" to be done. At the sprint planning, I say "Right, listen up! This is what we're going to do the next three weeks - anyone's got any better ideas or want to change anything? No? Good. Let's go."
I meet all engineers in my team three times each week for ~15 minutes to check on progress - that's it.
Anyone within the team is free to add or change stories in our backlog, but I do the planning work beforehand in order for us to get the right things done at the right time.
I also review and approve/reject all documentation/code changes - clear and consistent chain of command.
99% of the problem with agile is when it is in any way commanded. The entire purpose of it is a developer driven thing and resembled more like extreme programming. Then when it actually caught on, management had to find a way to gen involved and take credit, all the while injecting crimes against humanity like SaFe and Spotify model and SCRUM and it all went to ass.
Meetings in my work:
Retrospective
Refinement
Technical refinement
Sprint planning
Daily scrum
Daily coaching scrum
Mid sprint ticket review
Please make it stop
My experience as a non-millionaire engineer, 99% of companies who use scrum, implement scrum incorrectly. Thankfully my current team is doing it mostly right and our team culture is healthy enough that if something isn't working, we can improve on whatever the issue is. But I ain't gonna lie, meetings f'ing suck!
Task estimation and sprint planning are a part of SCRUM, not Agile. Agile is just a methodology for constant Git commits, failing fast, and moving forward. A lot of people confuse Agile for "SCRUM" or "Kanban" but the latter two are simply other methods for organizing tasks. Agile only defines the greater philosophy for developing software more swiftly.
@4:25 Stand ups are not worthless. Every 2 days we have a stand up at 10 and it's the perfect alarm clock for me. It reminds me that I technically am a working individual and I have a job even though it doesn't feel like it. Basically stand ups remind me to get the hell up and get some work done. But yeah other than that it's a pointless meeting where everyone tries to speedrun with as little detail as possible what they're doing, so the only person who actually understands wtf everyone is doing is the lead who already knows it.
Damn. This video has been eye opening to me. See, I got my PhD in physics and couldn't get a job as a physicist or in academia in general, so I decided to try some software development. I'm not an expert but I thought I could try. I spent one and a half years working and it was the worst experience of my life. I never want to step into software development ever again! Daily meetings that take 30 minutes, weekly meetings that take 3 to 4 hours. It was awful. But now I realize that might not be the reality of the profession, not everywhere at least. Maybe I should give it another shot.
It may sound passive aggressive but it's your obligation to find an environment where you can perform well and get paid well while doing so. Best of luck!
@@Overcome808 oh yeah, I agree. But with that first job as my only experience I incorrectly assumed this was true everywhere.
We have this same issue at a hardware shop. Especially when crunch happens.
Deadlines are tight and the project is a dumpster fire? Obviously the solution is multiple daily meetings. /s
I wonder, why do we even need dailies? Is there anyone without a messaging software, and a project group? You start your day, you write two sentences into the project chat: I'm working on X, I need to talk about Y. Done. Everyone can read it without breaking the flow. Bob comes in, sees the thing about Y, sets up an ad-hoc meeting. Done.
That soy dev nearly killed my fun. I‘m learning Java and nailing every challenge so far. I love it.
I especially love the thinking part in coding.
The legend has it that management's involvement when estimating tasks (or them forcing devs to reduce the estimates) makes the team more productive. 😆
Sprint's aren't real. The term 'sprint' is used by junior devs and people with an MBA to describe the periods of productivity between burnouts.
The concept of sprint planning (and agile development in general) only exists to try to convince people that the cycle of productivity->burnout->rest/re-hire->productivity is normal/intentional/acceptable.
I am still scared of people programming on a laptop without decent monitors or keyboards.
I need the screen estate for feeling good while jumping through code or writing it.
My work schedule began at 9:00.
Daily standups began at 9:30.
There goes my morning, can't get anything done until after 10:30AM+, and therefore most of the morning's gone.
That leaves you with half a workday to get work done, plus after-work work, unpaid of course.
Then they complain about missed deadlines.
Then you're fired because of "lower than average productivity". Yeah, no sh1t, Sherlock.
Standups should be every other day, at most.
Take a drink every time you double-tap to fast-forward past the gaps of silence.
I love the agile take that is not useful BUT going from complete chaos in a startup to another one where we do agile it does do a difference. Mind you all the agile is done by the dev team. Also I do agree that agile is best when done fast and efficiently so as long as meetings are short and sweet, agile is best, otherwise is just time wasting.
:)
Agile is useless then. If it's good with a good dev team and bad with a bad dev team, it has zero positive impact.
@@Asto508 So by that logic, C++ is useless too. When used properly is good when used poorly is crap, ergo zero positive impact...😐
@@arturfil I somehow missed that C++ is a project management paradigm. If you want to create analogies, try to compare at least within same categories.
@@Asto508 Doesn't matter, your argument is bad. Just because a tool or a "medium" is bad when poorly used, doesn't mean it can't be useful. It applies to any tool or medium.
Standup and sprint plannings work well if your team is a 2-pizza team. Daily 15 min standup is helpful but any longer is painful. Our sprint planning usually takes only 1 hr because the TPMs have done the leg work so planning is rather painless
2-pizza team.. that’s good I’m stealing it
Honestly following the cadence of Agile is pretty good when sprints are long enough to deliver, I mean it works because it gives you rituality with the given weekly meetings, daily standups and biweekly releases.
The only main meeting is when you're meeting with a business user that is detailing out the feature that they want, and you can go back and forth with them. Its something a BA is supposed to do, but since half the BAs usually have no technical experience to get enough detail and what questions to ask about the product in question about, and what's needed to code for it. Active senior devs make much better BAs in my experience.
I'm usually fine with standups, because then I can actually bring up the most important stuff with managers / etc and making sure that items are in their focus that I need from them. Things in Emails from my experience can get lost, and there's a lot of places that are already too inundated with emails.
A lot of these meetings are so dependant on how communications work at your company and the kind of work you're doing. Prime mentioned that stand ups are a waste because some admin person can't be bothered to read 7 emails. My current workplace we don't do emails, we barely do slack. In a team of 6 people we have a 15 minute standup meeting going around saying how it's going with work X and if there's any issues or blockers. And it really does last 10-15 minutes then the rest of the day is ours to manage how we want.
My last team was entirely based out of Minnesota, nothing against people of Minnesota, lovely team, lovely people, but meetings were hella long , 5 min meetings extended up to 20+ min, and God help Friday because everyone has to share what's they gonna do on weekends. I had to make shit up because I have no life outside of work.
We do daily standups and it holds engineers accountable for working rather than PS5ing all day.
"I've literally never once planned a sprint. Agile sucks"
is like saying
"I've literally never once turned on my stove. Cooking sucks"
If you, the dev, aren't planning your sprints, you're not doing agile. You're just doing normal project stuff. Just like if you're cooking without heat, you're not really cooking. People paying for the food you make at the restaurant might call you a cook, but you haven't cooked their food if you didn't apply heat (or ya know, other chemical things. Don't be pedantic).
I did agile ("scrum" as we called it back then) at my first internship after college. I planned my sprints. I talked with higher ups and users of my product to determine the necessities of each sprint timeline (ya know, weekly, monthly, quarterly forecast). We had (actual) 10m stand up meetings (we sat tho) and biweekly releases.
You aren't doing agile if you've never planned a sprint. Period. To dunk on agile if you've never even done it is like saying being in a boat sucks when you've only just swam in the ocean. You can call swimming in the ocean "being in a boat" all you want, but that doesn't make you right. So, too, does calling your process "agile" if you don't actually perform the things in agile and receive your tasks from on high.
In a medium sized software company I think the daily standup can be necessary to force people to voice their roadblocks and emergencies in production. Things a company the size of Netflix might boot deal with as much.
Why aren't they voicing their roadblocks to their managers when they appear? This is the actual problem that needs solving, not forcing them to speak. If they tend to conceal their struggles, they will likely conceal them on those meeting as well, and will try to maneuver in a way to not have them at all by picking particular tasks or particular ways of solving them. When you introduce a rigid system you invite people to game it while obscuring the actual problem underneath
@@NJ-wb1cz It also keeps the entire team informed on your working on. Managers and team members included. You can say “but they should speak up”. But the reality isn’t they don’t. If you let engineers and developers work in silo’d isolation they will. If they are going to conceal their struggles and what they are working on they are hurting the team and the company. These people usually find themselves unemployed every few years.
@@nerdobject5351 I don't need to hear what everyone is working on, and I don't want to be expected to know that. I'm not their manager. If there's relevant information it's up to the managers and leads to synchronize individuals.
If someone doesn't speak up, it's up to their managers to find an approach to that individual. Mechanically adding mandatory meetings just incentivizes them to game the system somehow and cheat around it because it doesn't address the root cause of why aren't they speaking up. Maybe their lead is a judgemental jerk? Maybe their peers bully them for not being perfect? Maybe the development process doesn't have enough support or whatever else? These aren't the things that will be revealed by making them invent a cool story in public, these are the things that require actual people skills to find and solve
Overall, it's just another facet of trying to offload management from managers to developers themselves, and is another trait of incompetent managers who can't manage their teams
1. Internal daily standups.
2. Sprint meeting 2 times a month.
3. Impulsive meetings anytime for useless talks that distracts from work because no good user stories because Agile - they hardly know what they want.
4. Time estimation nonsense which wastes time.
5. Daily EOD write ups in 4 different places which nobody reads.
I feel like (Daily) Standups are really important when you have interns in your team and/or hybrid/part time workers. Keeping up with everyone via text is just really hard so having one set time where everybody quickly shares something they did, want to do and impediments really helps the team to calibrate. The other „ceremonies“ usefulness really depends on your type of organisation. Especially in environments with a lot of compliance/regulations stuff it is super important to have good refinements since a tasks needs to be really well defined or you risk doing things twice or even fines in some cases.
Estimation beyond tasks that you've already done some time before is impossible, I've been 3 months from blocker to blocker (all of them not mine) to add xml to the list of supported formats in a project
Okay but get this: I attend FIVE standups each day. One for each concurrent sprint I'm in. One for each concurrent project that requires my full attention.
I'm working at a company that actually has a really effective agile practice. There are things to criticize of course, like the reality that scrum is a panoptic schema to keep you always under the all seeing eye of the scrum team, but really otherwise they have a really slick process in place where sprint planning, estimation, and retros take very little time. I do feel like it mostly works well, other than a few devs that sort of misuse code reviews as an opportunity to micromanage.
Sprint planning is important in my role because I need to report back to other people about when certain features are estimated to be done. I need to know who is doing what and how long they think the work will take, and I need to make sure the right things are prioritized.
Well that's the problem. Instead of the business empowering ownership and guiding what to focus on they just want dates. And usually they will be wrong. You get what you ask for
I've seen scrum work amazingly well. It was a contracting firm, and high up at the customer, they decided that incorrect work estimates were the worst possible outcome, and the second worst was inconsistent work throughput.
The result was that all tickets were made small enough that they could DEFINITELY be done in a week, then the time estimate of every single ticket was one week. The team would finish work by Tuesday, then have "meetings"... on Path Of Exile... for the rest of the week.
Sprints are the fucking bane of my existence. I find every excuse to not go to sprint related meetings.
No value out of sprint planning, I'd much rather have my PM and designer tell us what they want, and we figure out how to build it, at a reasonable speed. Predicting when a task can be completed almost never works unless it's a REALLLLLY simple thing that could be done in less than an hour, anything beyond that is just guessing. It's something management needs to know what everyone is doing, which I also totally get, higher ups will not want to hear "it'll take as long as it needs to take". So I'd much rather.....gimme a reasonable deadline, and we'll work towards it, and if we're sure we can't make it, we'll let you know ahead of time. This only really works if everyone in the team can self-govern and is accountable, slackers do exist.
commenting on my comment as I watch the vid, yeah I thought Tech Lead was cool too, until I realised he's an idiot.
"I have noting against Scrum at all. Scrum is just fine... all we have to do is get rid of the sprint, scrum master, product owner, backlog, scrum review (...) and certificates, and I have nothing against Scrum at all" (Allen Holub)
I'm curious as to why people are so against sprint planning meetings. I'm guessing there's a variance between our experiences and implementations of scrum. In my experience sprint planning was extremely useful. It's the only official time we really get to connect, discuss, and plan. When are you assigning tasks and coordinating with your team if not sprint planning? Surely not at your 15 minute standup. If anything is a waste of time it's sprint retros.
I read through some comments. It seems like a lot of people are describing poor implementations of scrum or agile and expressing their dismay. Yeah if you don't implement it properly or if it's not the right fit for your team of 100 obviously it's going to be a bad experience. Regardless of how you implement agile, just make it work to your team's advantage. We didn't ever have spring retros or official backlog grooming meetings because it didn't make sense for our team. It's really all about communication
Estimations are the worst. Management at my place wants estimation accuracy not to days or weeks, but HOURS, no padding allowed. If you under-estimate or over-estimate by just a bit, managers start chewing your head off. I had a project as a junior dev, where a senior estimated the hours according to their skills and knowledge and then handed off a majority of the project to me, and I had to work within his estimates. Nightmare fuel.
I need a new job.
Your channel is so addictive it should come with a warning label.
Our team of about 10 have standups everyday. But they only last about 15 min. I'm working this and have no roadblocks. When I've had a roadblock sometimes another developer would say he had it too but to just Slack him after the meeting. We don't do sprints we just get our stuff done. I'm the merge guy but also code. Merge changes to Dev, Staging, and Production after QA finishes their tests. Once it's DEV it's pretty easy to move. Click of a button and CI/CD goes to town.
Standup is the best meeting of the day, every day :-D
Standup is also nothing a manager takes part in so it couldn't be something that is necessary because the "manager is too lazy to read 7 emails"
I would kindly suggest that you consider your way of doing it part of your problem :-D
also, we don't talk about dogs, but software development
Same. I'm generally done in 10 minutes.
Q: "How long will it take you to complete this project?"
A: "It will take as long as a it takes. Plus the time I waste here answering this stupid question"
or
A: "Well that all depends. Are you going to interrupt me with all kinds of other tasks and still expect me to get this done? If so, it could take years"
"slightly older than the newest js framework" - had me rolling.
Where is the Retro? Where is the group therapy for manchildren / womanchildren?
Also: what does my scrum master do? She is giving the speaking order in stand ups but when she is not there...we handle fine without her. So what she is really paid for is a complete mistery to me.
When people ask you to write docs, I think "...unit test much!"
Nobody reads the docs!
Agile is literally a bigger waste of money than buying lottery tickets.... if we took all the $100,000s that are wasted on agile bullshit, and just bought powerball tickets at least life would be worth it
The most meaningful value out of sprint planning is to know what I should be working on and will get pressured for 2 days before sprint end, ignoring all the bugs I was forced to work on. (ok it gives me a rough view on what management wishes to prioritize)
Stand-ups are annoying, more annoying are check-ins at the end of the day. Imagine having a stand-up and 6h later have a check-in which is a stand-up, but the board is not shared in the meet call.
Estimation session are being split off as a way to have more colorful blocks on calendars to pretend to be busy. Every engineer just treats these meetings as another sprint-planning and management will either sit in or at least give you crap afterwards
Ahaahah this is now my favourite youtube channel
Sprints are useful to get from zero things done, to a crawling speedy. Needed in large institutions. A well working team can go fast with just a todo list.
Stand-ups are fine when they are good and short.
Stand-ups are not for questions, that is what your lead dev should be open to all day. After stand-up.
Our management trusts our judgments. That is a bigger blessing than you can imagine.
Also, the video under review is so slow 😂
9:30 "That singular window has cost me more... than WinRAR" LOL
The only useful part of sprint plannings in one of my recent companies was that it allowed me to point out the tickets that were not ready for development yet, but still were being pushed through by product managers
"I've never once planned a sprint in my decade at Netflix" I'm 1:24 into the video and already envious.... this bodes well
Your opinion on standups made me subscribe, and I'm not even a pro dev
It applies to other departments too
Good Sprint Planning = what are our priorities, ball park estimates as to how long thing should take, list blockers. If you're building out a lot of new functionality it's nice to know where we are and we're going.
Bad Sprint Planning = Product owners talking and doing what they should have done during the week during that meeting.