Bingo of crappy IT processes : programmer

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 92 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

God, as a true scrummaster - one who believes in actual scrum - where the devs make the rules - not management.. this hurts. This hurts so goddamn much.

4 hour planning? PMs shit the bed.
Story points = hours? Micromanagement
Estimate with that much accuracy? Micromanagement who are also terrible with managing their own schedules.
It's a simple task. - How would any business person know how long or expensive a dev task is.

And on and on, and of course you all know this. The term "Agile" has been so bastardized from it's conception by management who think it's a micromanagement tool. It's quite literally the opposite. It's mean to put the power in the hands of the developers - so they can be efficient and keep management out of their way. Management just couldn't handle handing over a tiny bit of power though. Have to break the fundamental pillars of agile, like dictating what a point is, or how long things should take. Ugh.

[–] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 37 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My job uses Safe. It's the bastardized scrum you speak of.

Are points the complexity, effort or time? Yes. No. No. Maybe. Yes. Who knows?

They also sum our teams capacity as if we are interchangeable cogs doing the 1 same simple task.

We have endless meetings. Daily 1hrs. Follow up to the follow up. Meeting to plan meetings. (I wish I was joking on this next on) Planning meetings to plan for the upcoming planning meetings.

It's chaos.

It's hell.

I get 5% as much actual work done as I used to. Not even joking. It's bad.

[–] sit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Im not in the industry and the answer to my question might be part of the problem: have you tried to say something? / what was the outcome of you criticising the whole planning and meeting mentality?

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Not the person you're answering but usually these are not a root problem but only a symptom. The answer will range from being told that you are the problem to "let's schedule a meeting to discuss that".

The mentality usually stems from higher up, and you don't really get to speak to people originating policy.

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[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I remember when I first read about AGILE. I was like "this is pretty cool - but there's no way corporations will actually adopt this methodology without completely turning it into just a set of new names for the same shit they've always done." Naturally, that's exactly what happened.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 points 3 weeks ago

I've had about three companies do agile correctly. They were either less than 10 people total or did not care at all. Any company with middle management dipped their toes in, I think because they need to prove their existence

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[–] crawancon@lemm.ee 45 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

who are these time wasters that just put bugs in their code. I mean come on.

[–] Squiddlioni@kbin.melroy.org 26 points 3 weeks ago

It's me, I do it. But only when I need something to do to stay awake in hour five of today's meetings to address the "quick turnaround" patch that I finished coding three weeks ago, but now they want a label to change and no one on the six teams that have somehow become involved seems to know who owns the package that the field the label represents belongs to, but they're absolutely certain we need to programmatically retrieve the text in case the package owner changes it at some point, and someone remembers that the original developer wrote code to get the label text 16 years ago, but it was removed from the program two years before the project started using source control, and they have an old installer around here somewhere that we can decompile or trace with Wireshark to get the right RPC name (sharing their screen while they have a rummage for it, natch), and someone else volunteers that they might know how to get a version of the server application from around that time since the client and server versions have to match, but it's technically the intellectual property of a different subcontractor who was just a guy in Alaska who passed away five years ago, but they're sure they can convince his estate to burn it to a disk and mail it to me if they can just find the contact information...

[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 34 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

PO: "Why does it seem like it takes a really long time to develop new features?"

Dev: "I'm glad you asked! We've got this piece of code (points at smoldering pile of spaghetti) that literally has to be changed every time we do anything. The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years. No one knows how it works and it's central to the entire application. I would estimate that this easily doubles the time it takes to work each ticket. I've created a set of stories to rewrite this code. We just need your approval to bring it into an upcoming sprint."

PO: "Can't... Hear... Breaking... Up... Bad connection..."

Dev: "Uhhh... This isn't a Teams meeting. You're sitting in the room with us right now."

PO: ...

Dev: "We know you're still here even if you're not moving."

PO: ...

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years

Four years? You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago

I recently learned that a web app I wrote in 1999 (for Internet Explorer lol) is still in use by the company I wrote it for. And this app was basically a graphical front end sitting on top of a mainframe application that dated to the 1970s, so my app's continued existence means that mainframe POS is still running, too. My app was written in Classic ASP and Visual Basic 6 - I truly pity whatever poor bastard has to keep supporting that shit. They probably have one ancient PC in a closet somewhere acting as the server for it.

[–] Uniquitous@lemmy.one 22 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Bikeshed? That's a new one for me.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 34 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Bikeshedding is when instead of making important, compex decisions that have consequences for being wrong, someone focuses on the simple, low impact, minimally important part of a project that has no consequences if its fucked up.

I think the term comes from construction projects where instead of finalizing the design of a complex building, the execs spend the entire time talking about bike parking on site. What color to have the roof, how many bikes it should hold, etc.

Bikeshedding is about offloading responsibility while still feigning involvement. You, the owner, avoid the whole part of your job youre paid for, i.e "making the hard decisions" and through misdirection and inaction, make someone else do it. That way you can blame them later if things go wrong, or take credit for their work if they go right.

[–] Uniquitous@lemmy.one 6 points 3 weeks ago

Ooh, yeah, seen that one before. Thanks for the explanation!

[–] ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 21 points 3 weeks ago

”All features are xy problems”

”PM adds new features to the sprint faster than they’re solved”

”Each release require two weeks of testing”

”Each release introduces new bugs for customers despite the two weeks of testing”

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

We have the one hour daily meetings we call “standup” 🙄

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago

Right? Minute 55-60 is the 15th minute. Fuck that. If it takes that long then the team is too big for agile or the scrum master had lost control.

[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Special prize for blackout?

A pizza party from 12-12:30, perhaps?

[–] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

12:15. And you bring your own pizza. Best we can do because budgets been tight after we spent 7 million dollars on the new 3rd party software system. It's turnkey and will solve all our issues right out of the box though.

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 weeks ago

turnkey /tûrn′kē″/ noun

The keeper of the keys in a prison; a jailer.
A person who has charge of the keys of a prison, for opening and fastening the doors; a warder.
An instrument with a hinged claw, -- used for extracting teeth with a twist.

Sounds about right.

[–] MolecularCactus1324@lemmy.world 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

“Shift left” by doing all the work yourself

Plan, design, code, test, debug, deploy, handle incidents, it’s all your job!

[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I would share this with my dev team

But the teams "scrum guide" and "product owner support" are on the chat and it would get my ass fired

[–] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 18 points 3 weeks ago

I prefer the inclusive term of "Scrum Dumpster". It really works.

[–] rational_lib@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Let's not forget "We need this right away!" then it takes weeks to deploy because the people who requested it weren't actually ready for it yet (if they don't change their mind and decide they don't actually want it at all).

[–] Inucune@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

One of these is wage theft. Don't enable that shit.

[–] mycelium_underground@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago

Yup. Not getting paid? Don't work.

Forced to? We have a word for someone who is forced to work for no compensation.... The word is slipping my mind, but I'm pretty sure the USA fought a civil war about it.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says "Well, it's a simple task. Are you having difficulty?".

It's an obscure and weirdly specific law.

(This is a joke, of course.)

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I have spent the past 20 years cultivating a variety of tones in which to utter my standard reply to such nonsense:

"Cool. You do it then."

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[–] Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Couldn't even make the effort to figure out how many rows and columns a bingo card has...

[–] Vinny_93@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

They have been omitted and registered as technical debt but they went ahead with the release anyway since the CFO's assistant only needs about half these anyway. For the coming three sprints, we will hire an external dev to finalize the card while it is in production. Any other developments on this will go to the backlog until the release is done.

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[+] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

[deleted]

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If story points are now hours, I hope you're fine with me putting a 40 on that ticket.

[–] Maalus@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn't even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are "I pulled it out me arse" unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway

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[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn't select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you'll have to start this whole process over.

Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"

[–] EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 3 weeks ago

The "Story Points = Hours" hits so goddamn hard. Like, tell me you don't fucking understand scrum without telling me you don't understand scrum.

We had a nice, effective production process on my team until a middle manager assigned to communicate with us started in with the whole "We can't spare this many points" bullshit.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago

4 hour planning

I've seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Unpaid overtime = work is just not going to be done.

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[–] Underwire@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago

When I started working for my current company there were really few meetings and I didn't know that it was possible. Everywhere I worked we had all the Scrum meetings and tech discussions meetings. At that time it was relatively a small company but not that small.

Now the company is getting bigger and some persons try to bring all the scrum shit. Even for small features, we do meetings to discuss them and last for hours. Some meetings have a big agenda that we always only tackle half of it. Sometimes we decide to do something with big impact and then someone suggests to include a person from another that doesn't even know our scope. And then we get "maybe we shouldn't do this as it will maybe have some negative impacts", "maybe we should add an exception" without even giving data to support their claim.

[+] AcesFullOfKings@feddit.uk 6 points 3 weeks ago

[deleted]

[+] someoneelse@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

[deleted]

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[–] vane@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

Does 5 time trackers count as 5 points ?

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 5 points 3 weeks ago

"Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter"

[–] makuus@pawb.social 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Bingo!

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

4x4 bingo?

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