|
Ithaqua posted:Stories also shouldn't be assigned, but should be grabbed by whoever is available in order of priority within the sprint, but that's another story entirely.  I'll talk to my tech lead about it, because your points are all pretty pertinent and would probably ameliorate some of the friction that estimation creates among the team. I think a bigger problem is that the "1 point = 1 dev day" is coming down from on high as well a bit. I don't foresee anything changing (this is for fintech, after all, so we're only working with a close approximation of agile at the best of times), but at least I'll feel better about myself.
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
That doesn't describe any methodology I've heard of, but any system where someone commits to doing work that they themselves estimated is better than most systems in the past.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:30
|
|
|
I have never seen actual value derived from ~~Agile~~ beyond the process-independent practice of: periodically communicate as necessary to discuss status, planning and estimates, and have a competent leader own organization and communication to customers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:35
|
|
|
Gounads posted:That doesn't describe any methodology I've heard of, but any system where someone commits to doing work that they themselves estimated is better than most systems in the past. Only if you're looking at things in terms of individual contributors instead of the team as a whole. I don't care if Bob can knock out a 10 point story in a day and Jane takes 3 days. I just care how many points of poo poo Bob and Jane can commit to doing and finishing on time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:36
|
|
|
Ithaqua posted:Only if you're looking at things in terms of individual contributors instead of the team as a whole. I don't care if Bob can knock out a 10 point story in a day and Jane takes 3 days. I just care how many points of poo poo Bob and Jane can commit to doing and finishing on time. By "most systems in the past" I was referring to things like the giant GANTT chart that YOU WILL COMPLETE WORK BY.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:45
|
|
|
IAmKale posted:That's the thing, we weren't working on a redesign of an existing product. This was an entirely new project that we were building from the ground up. Integration with the old system would have had to take place at some point, but in the near term we would have built and maintained it. There could be valid reasons for someone being like this although in your case it sounds like he's not good, and doesn't have those valid reasons. They sound terrible at business also because even if they had valid reasons for wanting things on the same stack, it's a waste of money to bring that up now and have you guys redo the work you've done. 10 weeks is a lot of money to light on fire. Then again maybe your place is rolling in money.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 19:58
|
|
|
Yeah given that my previous experience with "Agile" was at a bank, where "Agile" meant "you get a half hour long meeting every morning along with all the other meetings", this is practically nirvana. I look forward to the mythical future when I finally get my rear end out of fintech and maybe get to experience something even better 
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:00
|
|
|
IAmKale posted:So I mean, is this a pretty typical reaction to something like this happening? I'm freaking out a bit because I just started this gig and thought I'd be done with job searching for a couple of years, but with the rest of the team slowly on their way out I now have to dive back into the cesspool that is technical recruiters and resume-scanning algorithms and just ugh. I mean, worst case, I could probably migrate to the main HQ and join the development team to work on our company's main project. But I've talked with people who work over there and have learned that it's a hell of its own brought about by years of this same founder's micromanaging. I don't foresee good things coming of a decision to get involved in that. I think it is a pretty typical reaction to your founders response. It does indicate that he's going to micromanage you to death on this jQuery thing, and you will be miserable, even if you like jQuery. As others have posted, your best option is to probably look for something new. You'll never convince this guy of anything now, he'll just see it as defiance and clamp down harder. It will probably be even worse for you as your team mates leave and you are left holding the 10 week bag (which is now 50 weeks because you're alone, but he thinks it should still be 10).
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:08
|
|
|
ChickenWing posted:Yeah given that my previous experience with "Agile" was at a bank, where "Agile" meant "you get a half hour long meeting every morning along with all the other meetings", this is practically nirvana. I look forward to the mythical future when I finally get my rear end out of fintech and maybe get to experience something even better Sup buddy, I worked in medtech.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:09
|
|
|
Xarn posted:Sup buddy, I worked in medtech.  
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
ChickenWing posted:Yeah given that my previous experience with "Agile" was at a bank, where "Agile" meant "you get a half hour long meeting every morning along with all the other meetings", this is practically nirvana. I look forward to the mythical future when I finally get my rear end out of fintech and maybe get to experience something even better This was exactly my experience with Agile in fintech, it was awful and I am so happy to be out of there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:17
|
|
|
If you have a Gantt chart, you're probably doing Waterfall probably, not Agile nor agile / lean. Hence, topic title is appropriate.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:33
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:I think it is a pretty typical reaction to your founders response. It does indicate that he's going to micromanage you to death on this jQuery thing, and you will be miserable, even if you like jQuery. As others have posted, your best option is to probably look for something new. You'll never convince this guy of anything now, he'll just see it as defiance and clamp down harder. It will probably be even worse for you as your team mates leave and you are left holding the 10 week bag (which is now 50 weeks because you're alone, but he thinks it should still be 10).
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:36
|
|
|
necrobobsledder posted:If you have a Gantt chart, you're probably doing Waterfall probably, not Agile nor agile / lean. Hence, topic title is appropriate. My previous job was the inspiration for the thread title. Someone actually talked about how we were doing it, as if it was a desirable thing. At the very least, I've not had any other Agile experience, so I don't know how good I could be having it. It's nice because I can be pleasantly surprised at every place I go that's better.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:37
|
|
|
IAmKale posted:Here's a follow-up question: how do I spin this whole experience when I'm interviewing? I've only been with this company for three months. "$CURRENT_JOB just isn't a good fit for me. I want to be forward looking w.r.t. new technology stacks and modern best practices like continuous integration and unit testing, for example."
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 20:55
|
|
|
IAmKale posted:Here's a follow-up question: how do I spin this whole experience when I'm interviewing? I've only been with this company for three months. That is tricky, but if you are planning to continue with modern front-end development, most places will be pretty receptive to your story. Same rules apply, don't badmouth your idiot founder, and focus on how you are very enthusiastic about doing Angular/Angular2/React/whatever, but you and the founder just did not see eye to eye on the technology. Munkeymon posted:"$CURRENT_JOB just isn't a good fit for me. I want to be forward looking w.r.t. new technology stacks and modern best practices like continuous integration and unit testing, for example." What he said
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 21:23
|
|
|
JawnV6 posted:Your foot down or not, the project isn't going to make up 2 months of lost time because the itinerant said so. I've been in the situation where manager stack up meetings to understand why delays didn't magically evaporate when something transitioned to a new team, good on you. Thanks, he's not happy and set up a meeting for next Monday with the higher ups, but I already have every other engineer on this project agreeing with me. The timeline right now is equivalent to "here's a alpha board you have 3 weeks to get it up and running with 7 custom drivers and software that integrates with it, also we have provisioned no time in the event that there are any hardware issues with this 8 layer incredibly complex board. " Not going to happen bub. FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 21:37
|
|
|
ChickenWing posted:
Oh man. Just wait until someone o. High says the magic words then, "Wait, I can get 40 story points from the team now? If they just work 2 hours more that'll be 10 more points! Look what 10 points would give us!!!" (Actual words spoken by someone on high.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 04:25
|
|
|
IAmKale posted:Not to mention the fact that he balked when he saw our CI dashboard showing our build process; there's no CI to speak of with the company's main product and we think a large part of it is the founder's belief that tests "can just be simple python tests you manually run before deployment" 
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 05:25
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:Oh man. Just wait until someone o. High says the magic words then, "Wait, I can get 40 story points from the team now? If they just work 2 hours more that'll be 10 more points! Look what 10 points would give us!!!" (Actual words spoken by someone on high.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 14:45
|
|
|
Maybe next year I'll be able to leverage my ten years of experience into a $90k salary!
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 15:29
|
|
|
$90k with 10 years experience as a developer is fine if you're in flyover country or work primarily for academic or government institutions (also in flyover country or evidently Atlanta), but these were for operations engineers on-call as well and that commands a premium over developers by default. Otherwise, you're probably underpaid by choice or lack of choice of employers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 16:03
|
|
|
I am going to murder my QA guy. Seriously. I am completely baffled how this guy got hired. He simply does not comprehend that his job is to test the acceptance criteria in a story. That's all. He just sent something back to me because a sprite sheet was missing in an entirely different section of the application. This happens with every single story. I tell him to file a bug and get back "Well, I already sent to back to you so can you fix that?" My boss gets notifications of story status changes and then asks me why so many of my stories fail QA.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:19
|
|
|
Practice saying "Make a new story for it."
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:24
|
|
|
mintskoal posted:I am going to murder my QA guy. Seriously. I am completely baffled how this guy got hired. He simply does not comprehend that his job is to test the acceptance criteria in a story. That's all. He just sent something back to me because a sprite sheet was missing in an entirely different section of the application. This happens with every single story. I tell him to file a bug and get back "Well, I already sent to back to you so can you fix that?" My boss gets notifications of story status changes and then asks me why so many of my stories fail QA. I know this pain. I also get jumbled word-salad describing a problem that I'm cross-eyed by the time I'm done reading it. At least a dozen times I've asked him to provide what he did, what he saw, what he expected to see. Three pretty basic pieces of info. I don't think I've ever gotten more than one of those.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:27
|
|
|
mintskoal posted:"Well, I already sent to back to you so can you fix that?
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:28
|
|
|
necrobobsledder posted:$90k with 10 years experience as a developer is fine if you're in flyover country or work primarily for academic or government institutions I work in the private sector in California.  I sometimes feel simultaneously underpaid, relative to other companies in my area, and overpaid, relative to the value of my contributions to society.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:34
|
|
|
CPColin posted:I work in the private sector in California. It's actually you and the average worker who are underpaid 
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 18:43
|
|
|
To be fair, yeah, worker wages have stagnated for decades while cost of living (and more importantly, value for said services and goods) has gone down for consumers. Big Macs aren't even that cheap now and people routinely make below $8 / hour everywhere that aren't even in fast food. Come to think of it, games industry is the low end of wages for programmers considering your average game programmer is probably immeasurably more skilled than your typical enterprise do-nothing-but-meetings developer. For every John Carmack there's like 10,000 programmers suffering for decades pulling at least 60+ hour weeks with mostly pretty pixels to show for it. But in terms of fun on the job, I'd far rather be at Valve doing 100 hours / week than 40 in DoD.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 20:02
|
|
|
I learned that working for a AAA game company was not my dream job EA treats you like slaves, and very few AAA game companies are any diff. Valve seems cool.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 20:39
|
|
|
mintskoal posted:I am going to murder my QA guy. Seriously. I am completely baffled how this guy got hired. He simply does not comprehend that his job is to test the acceptance criteria in a story. That's all. He just sent something back to me because a sprite sheet was missing in an entirely different section of the application. This happens with every single story. I tell him to file a bug and get back "Well, I already sent to back to you so can you fix that?" My boss gets notifications of story status changes and then asks me why so many of my stories fail QA. Go to his manager with every single story for the past 4-5 sprints (or 2-3 months) showing a pattern of scope creep and time wasting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 20:51
|
|
|
You may want to go to your own manager too for backup, before sticking your foot into a pile of politics.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 14:50
|
|
|
I just solved the weirdest problem I've yet encountered in my java development experience. I wrote a java method that uses reflection to generate notifications based on object fields that contain a value. I've been waiting on some stuff from another team, so it sat on a backburner for a bit and I never pushed my branch. Other team's code got merged into our branch last night, so I get back into the thick of it today. I get everything to a point where tests are green and push to origin. Notification comes in from Bamboo: build failure. Test failure. One of the tests I just made is failing. Double check my last results - green across the board. I run a local gradle build to see what's up. Build failure, test failure in that same test. It's an assertion failure, of all things - verify(class, times(2)).method(isA(TheGenericClassIOnlyExpectTwice.class)) is being invoked 3 times. All the rest of the assertions are passing, so somewhere I've managed to populate another field. I know my test data is set up correctly. I change my gradle plugin to the new one I hadn't picked up yet, refresh all my dependencies, clean the project, yada yada yada. Still borked. What the heck gradle. I add in a debug println, figure out how to display stdout and stderr in the gradle console output, then run the build again. And there it is - the four fields I was expecting, including two that only flag the generic field, then something called $jacocoData. Turns out jacoco is a code coverage reporting plugin we have attached to our gradle build. In the process of doing it's coverage-reporting thing, it injects a static synthetic field into the class, which getClass().getDeclaredFields() dutifully picks up and reports as having a non-null value. Prior to today I didn't even know that you could inject fields into a class at runtime, much less that that was called a synthetic field. Happily, the Field class includes an isSynthetic() method, and thus my way-too-involved debugging trip ended with 20 characters and now my build is green and I am slowly becoming the team's go-to reflections guy. tl;dr Java reflection is scary
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 19:05
|
|
|
Ah, I see you ran into the problems I hit when reverse-engineering Java classes and trying to hook into them... in 2006  . We had a program that is fed a JAR (which was generated code from SQL tables not too dissimilar from how wsdl2java works), does reflection on it at runtime looking for certain signatures in private methods and fields, generates a bunch of new Java code, feeds that to a forked process that runs javac (we didn't have compiler support in Java 5, son), and our software would dynamically load the newly generated JAR. Had to figure out wtf a synthetic field and synthetic class were on the phone during a critical PoC and a customer had generated a JAR that seemed clean but they had deployed our software in a container that we weren't supporting along with a bunch of Spring classes. Writing that code generator is also how I found out that Java classes have a limit of 64k methods and that there's only 255 arguments allowed to a method.The lesson is always be cognizant of anything that can perform bytecode manipulation, method injection, etc. when you're using reflection in your own code. This also includes AOP / DI frameworks as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 21:45
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 23:54
|
|
|
Both of you, stop. Stop. Step away from the computer. Also, never use Ruby, especially not Rails
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2016 02:40
|
|
|
Steve French posted:Both of you, stop. Stop. Step away from the computer. Also, never use Ruby, especially not Rails But this is my life now, and I love it. That java talk did have me comparing it to Ruby, but nothing that was as bad as described seemed to relate. REverse engineering a jar? Why? That pays alot, right?
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2016 03:16
|
|
|
I reversed engineered a jar for work a while back. It wasn't too difficult; the decompiler gave me pretty reasonable Java code to work with.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2016 03:55
|
|
|
Steve French posted:Stop. Step away from the computer. Funny, this is basically what my tech lead says to me every time I use reflection  (okay it's not that bad but he is of the opinion that reflection is best used in extreme moderation and flinches every time I mention how easy it was to solve a particular problem with it)
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2016 13:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
In most software development, it seems to me that reflection would only be good for tapdancing around bad object design. I'd be really interested in reading anything that proves me wrong!
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2016 14:04
|
|
