|
My Rhythmic Crotch posted:I have a question... I don't practice Agile with a capital 'A' so I have never used any of the project management tools or bug trackers out there that have Agile features baked in. The team is supposed to do that together and reach consensus. If you say "it's easy, 2 points" and I say "that area of the application is a loving minefield, 20 points" that doesn't mean that the story is actually 11 points. We might compromise ("Well, if we foo the bar, it might make it less prone to breaking, then we could call it 13"), or you might say "poo poo, I didn't realize that -- I haven't ever touched that code before. We'll go with your estimate." New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 21:08 on May 8, 2016 |
#
?
May 8, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 17:04 |
|
|
I think the idea is that the whole team is supposed to agree and if it can't, it means the task hasn't been broken down enough.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
Agile is designed to spark as many tedious, spergy, pedantic engineer debates as possible. In a given sprint I probably spend 4 story points sitting in meetings listening to people debate things that don't matter. And by 4 story points I mean 4 hours. Errr
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2016 14:24
|
|
|
All the "fast meetings with a point" stuff only works if there is someone really dedicated to that and willing to say "ok, that's enough."
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 04:04
|
|
|
I had a boss 15 years or so ago. He had a fake beeper, one that originally had candy in it once. Whenever a meeting went long, he got a beep he had to look into.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 12:55
|
|
|
smackfu posted:All the "fast meetings with a point" stuff only works if there is someone really dedicated to that and willing to say "ok, that's enough." Which is why I love that our stand ups are limited to 15 minutes and my boss adheres to that religiously. Total 180 from my last job where they lasted anywhere from 30 minutes - 2 hours.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
At my last job I was the scrum master and I squeezed in more than just status updates and the usual YTB (yesterday, today, blockers) because our daily standup was basically the only meeting my team members had on their calendars for the day usually, so I didn't feel too bad for a fully remote team of 6-7 to extend into 30 min when it might be the only social interaction they have the entire day besides maybe 5 messages in Slack or getting bombarded by customers asking for help troubleshooting a mundane issue. What I found really ate up time was basically one or two people that are just really chatty, but again, if that's really the only social interaction your team gets typically for structural reasons I don't think it's a big deal to bump into 30 minutes. The stranger scrum meetings I've seen are ones over within 90 seconds, and I have to wonder if that may be a meeting anti-pattern in itself. Basically it's a round table of "No updates, no blockers" across 10+ people. If there's nothing new among anyone, why bother with a meeting at all besides to just keep some continuity of communication and to dedicate some time for catching up? That's fine and desirable IMO between managers and direct reports but I haven't heard of this being imperative among project team members.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 18:14
|
|
|
necrobobsledder posted:At my last job I was the scrum master and I squeezed in more than just status updates and the usual YTB (yesterday, today, blockers) because our daily standup was basically the only meeting my team members had on their calendars for the day usually, so I didn't feel too bad for a fully remote team of 6-7 to extend into 30 min when it might be the only social interaction they have the entire day besides maybe 5 messages in Slack or getting bombarded by customers asking for help troubleshooting a mundane issue. What I found really ate up time was basically one or two people that are just really chatty, but again, if that's really the only social interaction your team gets typically for structural reasons I don't think it's a big deal to bump into 30 minutes. I have a problem with the first one because the standup is just for the team to update each other on what they're doing from day to day. You should limit it to the three questions so everyone who doesn't need to hear whatever else you want to talk about can leave and do work. That's what my team does; we say "okay thanks, standup over" and then whoever has issues can talk about them, either in the current room or they get together in their work areas or whatever. The second one, people were missing the point. You never have "no updates" unless you didn't do any sprint work yesterday and don't plan on doing any today. Those three questions are not hard, and they should always be answerable: "I worked on Story #3 on The Sprint Board yesterday, I will work on #3 today as well. I am blocked by our subscription to one of our key 3rd party web services having expired, can't finish until it gets renewed."
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 18:41
|
|
|
quote:"I worked on Story #3 on The Sprint Board yesterday, I will work on #3 today as well. This is why standups are dumb. Your boss and/or ticketing system should ALREADY KNOW THIS. Same with blockers. Just flag your ticket in Jira or whatever and update it and ping the right people. This whole stand up in a circle each morning and pretend we don't have tools to share information thing is silly. Not to mention why are you waiting until the next DAY to bring up issues?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 19:35
|
|
|
It's not for the boss, it's for your team mates. How often would people look in a tool to see what everyone else is working on?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 19:53
|
|
|
Gounads posted:It's not for the boss, it's for your team mates. If you're not working with your teammate on a project why does it matter? If you are working with them then you know what they're doing.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 19:56
|
|
|
revmoo posted:If you're not working with your teammate on a project why does it matter? If you are working with them then you know what they're doing. By definition a scrum team is all on the same project so your first question doesn't make sense. For any project of any reasonable level of complexity and size it's not reasonable to assume everyone knows what everyone else is doing. So the natural question is WHY is it important for everyone to have an idea about what's going on. Sometimes, there are problems already solved in other areas that you don't know about. Sometimes someone makes a decision on one part that influences another part, but he didn't know it would. Sometimes it's just nice to have an overview of what's going on in the project. Sometimes finding out some feature is implemented makes your life easier to test yours. There's a lot of reasons it can be useful and taking 5 minutes a day is a pretty low-effort way making sure the info-sharing happens.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 20:14
|
|
|
One place I worked at gave the squekers from dog toys to everyone. And we literally stood up. If someone was getting off topic a light squeak could be heard, and as others realized what was going on more joined in until the original derailers are almost defeaned with squeaks. It was a real fun passive aggressive thing to do and it was always funny when that moment hit you and you realize all the squeaking is going on. For the first couple seconds you just don't notice it and then suddenly its like a wave washing over you. And interestingly the squeak has the added benefit of being outside the range of normal human vocal frequencies so the conversation could wrap up, albeit quickly, without the noise interfering with it too much. http://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Squeakers-Downtown-Pet-Supply/dp/B001A7JF44
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 22:20
|
|
|
KoRMaK posted:One place I worked at gave the squekers from dog toys to everyone. And we literally stood up. If someone was getting off topic a light squeak could be heard, and as others realized what was going on more joined in until the original derailers are almost defeaned with squeaks. We just softly call out "squirrel!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAIGLkSMls It's a cue that we're getting distracted. We actually used to have a plush squirrel you could either hold up or toss to them if you wanted, but that guy's six year old wanted it back.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 22:51
|
|
|
KoRMaK posted:One place I worked at gave the squekers from dog toys to everyone. And we literally stood up. If someone was getting off topic a light squeak could be heard, and as others realized what was going on more joined in until the original derailers are almost defeaned with squeaks. Yeah we had a doll with a voicebox that you could squeeze for that purpose. But when our scrum master quit and they asked me to quasi-take over until they got/promoted a new one, the first time I tried to keep things on track (in planning) I apparently made somebody so butthurt that I got called into the boss's office later over it. I didn't use the doll either, I just said, "hey I think we're getting a bit off topic here, let's take this outside planning" but apparently that was a white glove to the face for at least one of them. So next time I'm just going to let the same two people who always get off topic argue with each other for 40 minutes while the other 13 people jerk off or (like what happened this time) get frustrated and leave. Bossman didn't reprimand me or anything, he just mentioned that there were some people who maybe kinda sorta didn't appreciate my enthusiasm or something. He tried real hard to avoid saying people complained about me having the gall to interrupt when THEIR ISSUE WAS BEING DISCUSSED  but that's what he meant.Seriously, the argument was such bullshit. There was a story, it was more than a sprint's worth of work, we broke it down into pieces, the pieces got prioritized, we pulled one of them into the sprint, and we moved on. 2 hours later one of the stakeholders pipes up with, "wait why aren't you doing all of this thing at once?" and somehow that turned into 40 minutes of arguing that I was not allowed to stop (because one of them was a manager and THEY wanted to talk about it NOW).
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2016 23:17
|
|
|
That's the agile process working by exposing issues with the team. Butthurt babies need to get out.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2016 02:15
|
|
|
revmoo posted:This is why standups are dumb. Your boss and/or ticketing system should ALREADY KNOW THIS. Same with blockers. Just flag your ticket in Jira or whatever and update it and ping the right people. I agree, our team is distributed and we just use Jira and Slack to keep track of who's doing what. Create some nice filters/dashboards/kanban boards in Jira and you're good to go. Do a Skype call whenever you need to discuss stuff in detail (not often).
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 19:40
|
|
|
Daily standups aren't for bringing up issues, unless by "bringing up issues" you really specifically mean "I was bitten by this behavior yesterday in this thing we have/use, hey everyone, watch out for this so you don't get bitten too." Facilitating communication really isn't that hard.
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 19:52
|
|
|
amotea posted:I agree, our team is distributed and we just use Jira and Slack to keep track of who's doing what.
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 19:54
|
|
|
I like this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdWMcs9EEOE&t=10572s
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 20:07
|
|
|
Vulture Culture posted:Daily standups aren't for bringing up issues, unless by "bringing up issues" you really specifically mean "I was bitten by this behavior yesterday in this thing we have/use, hey everyone, watch out for this so you don't get bitten too." I'm glad I work in an environment where we don't need to "facilitate communication". If someone runs into an issue or needs to announce something they do it in the #dev chatroom where everybody sees it. It's asynchronous and synergistic. I ran the numbers on dev hourly rates * 10 developers @ 15 minutes a day. It was very illuminating. Those morning standups are expensive!
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 20:39
|
|
|
revmoo posted:I'm glad I work in an environment where we don't need to "facilitate communication".
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2016 23:40
|
|
|
Vulture Culture posted:Out of curiosity, how frequent are your releases? At least once a week, but it varies a lot. Some times we'll do a more than one a day. Our record is five. Just depends on what's queued up.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 12:03
|
|
|
In the grand list of offensive office practices, a daily 10 minute meeting is pretty near the bottom. I don't know how valuable our standup is, but at least it is short and everyone actually says something unlike most of my meetings.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
Vulture Culture posted:The problem with using Slack for anything important is that chat is even easier than email to declare bankruptcy on. I work with a largely distributed team and we all recently started to use Slack. I loved it, coming from an IRC background -- I don't mind multiple threads of conversations taking place at once, it's easy to pick it up based on context and we have like 5-10 people using it over the course of a day so it's not like it's full of fast-moving conversation. My co-workers complained about it enough that we instituted a stupid rule that every message has to be hashtagged to create "threads", making it impossible to follow a flow of conversation because you have to parse out the subject line. "#foomoduleproblem I'm having a problem with the foo module". I no longer use Slack.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 15:26
|
|
|
We used ryver for a while, the posts feature was great for more threaded discussion. But we switched to Slack because literally everything else was better.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 15:41
|
|
|
Ithaqua posted:My co-workers complained about it enough that we instituted a stupid rule that every message has to be hashtagged to create "threads", making it impossible to follow a flow of conversation because you have to parse out the subject line. "#foomoduleproblem I'm having a problem with the foo module". I no longer use Slack.  Do they actually feel they're more effectively using Slack that way?
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 16:10
|
|
|
Ithaqua posted:I work with a largely distributed team and we all recently started to use Slack. I loved it, coming from an IRC background -- I don't mind multiple threads of conversations taking place at once, it's easy to pick it up based on context and we have like 5-10 people using it over the course of a day so it's not like it's full of fast-moving conversation. Did they not know that you can have multiple channels?
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 16:45
|
|
|
Have an offer on a new job as lead Architect on a Salesforce app since they basically outsourced all dev to India and had no one at the company who can code or do any kind of technical planning. So I am going to enjoy telling guys half the world a way that they suck at Apex and Visualforce. Probably going to institute something like Slack so that the devs from all this companies talk to each other and most importantly to me. Since communication is hard enough when a team of people are together but as soon as external people get involved you have to drag them kicking and screaming to at least trying to work together.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 17:10
|
|
|
FamDav posted:Story points are awful. You are creating a silly proxy for time in the name of consistency, and when you do planning/estimation you end up throwing out everyone's opinions in favor of a single homogenized answer. Rather than attempting to measure uncertainty, you stick your head in the sand and pretend it's unmeasurable. Isn't most project planning decidedly non-normal, though? If you have a 2 week project, the earliest it can get done is -2wks but it could conceivably take 8+ weeks to finish.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 17:32
|
|
|
Dr. Stab posted:Did they not know that you can have multiple channels? They're aware. But we have a "general" channel that we use for short-lived discussions, and people were complaining that they couldn't follow unthreaded discussion. Making a new channel for a quick question is silly. But tagging each message with a subject line is equally silly. I made the point that the beauty of Slack is that I can just dash off a quick "hey guys what's up with the foo module?" message in 3 seconds without having to come up with a subject line. I'm was doing this for a while to point out how absurd it is: "#havingaproblemwiththefoomodulecansomeonehelp Hey guys I'm having a problem with the foo module, can someone help?" but then I decided to stop being a prick.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
I made a #cat_pics channel in our company slack and it is by far the busiest channel. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 19:07
|
|
|
Doesn't slack charge per non-org member beyond the first channel? If you're using a lot of contractors and they're all stuffed in #general I can see how that would get confusing.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 19:08
|
|
|
Slack is adding threaded messages later this year. I think it's a dumb idea, but I don't have to deal with hundreds of people in a channel.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 19:51
|
|
|
revmoo posted:I made a #cat_pics channel in our company slack and it is by far the busiest channel. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Same except #emoji_zone
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 19:57
|
|
|
Having to switch back to hangouts makes me sad. Being able add  or  is vital for my work chat experience dammit! 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
I'm still on a mission to get all (Non-NSFW) SA smilies into our Slack. I have not been successful. I doubt I ever will be.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 20:40
|
|
|
I think in PureCloud the emoji's all came from somewhere else but they left the middle finger one :fu: in which is great. We've been campaigning to get more added but the requests fall on deaf ears.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 20:54
|
|
|
We have Slack but a lot of people insist on using Lync for god knows why. It's like MS decided in a meeting to make the worst possible chat client ever.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 20:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 17:04 |
|
|
mintskoal posted:We have Slack but a lot of people insist on using Lync for god knows why. It's like MS decided in a meeting to make the worst possible chat client ever. Nah, it probably happened over several meetings and a few working lunches.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 21:09
|
|