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Zaphod42 posted:We've implemented a standard template for PRs where you have to fill out certain steps as part of the git request message, it saves a lot of headaches and reminds the person who wrote it to check the original ticket and makes sure everything's cleaned up. We had some lazy/poo poo developers at one point which led us to create a PR template with a little checklist like this that includes posting a list of your test cases on the ticket which has worked fairly well even after the lazy/poo poo developers were booted. Partially it makes people think through what they've done and the original ticket, but it also makes it really quick to notice if someone has completely overlooked something important or has added weird poo poo that shouldn't be there.
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Nov 14, 2019 14:27
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| # ? May 12, 2024 16:52 |
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Has anyone effectively taught their PM/management how to prioritize / manage customer requests? It seems that as my company gets more customers, my manager has lost all ability to prioritize. I'm being asked to jump on issues "ASAP!" while in the middle of other things because "a customer is unhappy!" and surprise surprise, those new issues are poorly described and inevitably require reworking after initially being "approved" because they were basically a custom demand from a single customer. It's super frustrating because before this, I thought the company's approach to prioritization was actually getting a lot better. There were long-term goals and strategic thinking about the product, but now that we have some customers, every long-term feature is getting sidelined in favor of "move the button because random customer demanded it".
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Nov 14, 2019 14:46
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If you find out, tell me.
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Nov 14, 2019 15:10
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vonnegutt posted:Has anyone effectively taught their PM/management how to prioritize / manage customer requests? It seems that as my company gets more customers, my manager has lost all ability to prioritize. I'm being asked to jump on issues "ASAP!" while in the middle of other things because "a customer is unhappy!" and surprise surprise, those new issues are poorly described and inevitably require reworking after initially being "approved" because they were basically a custom demand from a single customer. My new company records which customers are making requests and then we track how much time we’re sinking into said requests. I’m told that after tracking started, it was revealed that the most demanding customers were the ones paying the least, so now they are low priority. Also their feature requests were often pretty esoteric and not useful for customers outside of this one sector the demanding customers mostly belonged to, so not worth it to prioritize. The only time it’s worth it for us to drop everything and implement a customer feature request ASAP is if the customer is one of the top payers and won’t renew without the requested feature. In general, it helps to run some cost/benefit analysis on implementing a requested feature. If the feature would take 80 hours to implement and only benefit a single customer who isn’t paying you that much in the first place, gently caress that. But if the feature takes 1-2 hours to implement and would be useful to many customers other than the one requesting it, that’s well worth it because you make the customer happy, it’s low effort, and it’s something you can tell other customers about and make them happy too.
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Nov 14, 2019 17:56
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I guess a lot of the problem is convincing management that such tracking and triage is a good idea. I'm the only developer in my department, so I got to set up a tiny JIRA instance from scratch. When I showed my boss the "Triage Board" I made (which is separate from the board where I sort by priority and separate from the day-to-day task board), they reacted to the word "triage" like it was some completely alien concept. My boss also created an Excel spreadsheet in Teams, listing a customer's issues and had the customer give each issue both a Low/Medium/High priority and sort the list into priority order. Then my boss keeps asking for status updates on items wayyy down the list that I haven't even looked at yet. Also I have other tasks I'm working on because this customer isn't my only responsibility. My boss has a PMP certificate.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:09
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Queen Victorian posted:In general, it helps to run some cost/benefit analysis on implementing a requested feature. If the feature would take 80 hours to implement and only benefit a single customer who isn’t paying you that much in the first place, gently caress that. But if the feature takes 1-2 hours to implement and would be useful to many customers other than the one requesting it, that’s well worth it because you make the customer happy, it’s low effort, and it’s something you can tell other customers about and make them happy too. That sounds good. I'll recommend keeping track of these small requests. The problem is that right now, none of them are really analyzed at all: it's just, "customer wants X, do X" whether it will take 80 hours or 1, and it's up to the developer to work up an estimate and flag which ones are huge. Luckily, if they are told it's a large feature, they will re-prioritize it, but right now everything is "top priority" and pushing aside other work. Having to switch contexts and estimate out new tasks constantly is the major problem here so I'll probably reply to the next one with that.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:12
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CPColin posted:had the customer give each issue both a Low/Medium/High priority and sort the list into priority order. Well that's your problem right there. The customer isn't your boss, and the customer doesn't share your companies' priorities. This might be a good time to break out a physical rolling board, index cards, tape, and sharpies. Tell your boss that you can do about 5 points a week, so the order in which they get done is up to him, but if they're not up on the board you won't work on them because you physically don't have the time. Lastly, insist that if they put a new index card on the board any time except the start of the Monday, two more cards will come off; the last because you don't have time for it now and the second to last for the context switch. They go into a special "Bumped" section, which sits next to the "Done" section.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:43
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So far I've just been largely ignoring my boss, just like everybody else in the department does. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem going on here. Boss is retiring in May and if I'm included at all in the search for their replacement, I'm going to be grilling people on their project management styles. (And probably also suggesting to the highers-up that a department of only seven employees probably doesn't need a full-time Director.)
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Nov 14, 2019 18:54
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CPColin posted:(And probably also suggesting to the highers-up that a department of only seven employees probably doesn't need a full-time Director.) That threatens someone's fiefdom though.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:16
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There’s a push to get employees to answer questions about “feedback on things [company] can do to improve retention”. They say that people’s answers will be anonymous, but they’re scheduling 20min one-on-ones with another employee to get your answers, which they then put into an anonymized(?) form. Is it just me, or is that kinda weird? Doing an in-person interview of sorts and having someone else type in a form for me defeats the entire purpose of anonymity. Is this a typical practice? What is this?
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Nov 14, 2019 19:28
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That's called a trap.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:32
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That wouldn’t surprise me. Apparently it’s led by an independent employee group, so maybe they just don’t get how this stuff works. I might ask HR if they know about it before I share any answers.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:37
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CPColin posted:I guess a lot of the problem is convincing management that such tracking and triage is a good idea. That sucks. Our bosses are all just senior engineers and their whole job is just to attend meetings and triage tickets so we don't have to. If I even see a ticket its guaranteed to be ready and actionable and high priority. Its awesome. Sucks for them to have to do triage all day long, but IDK I guess that's why they get paid more, I think everybody wins lol.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:52
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Some people actually enjoy and are good at the triage part. It'd be extremely nice to have a setup like that here, but alas.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:54
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Apparently it’s sanctioned by HR and since it’s opt-in it’s not anonymous, so  I’ll choose my words carefully. I’m not scared of ‘em. me 
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Nov 14, 2019 20:02
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Pollyanna posted:Apparently it’s sanctioned by HR and since it’s opt-in it’s not anonymous, so If it's opt-in, you could just not do it...
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Nov 14, 2019 20:12
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I mean, yeah, the more I think about it the more I realize we actually are in the middle of a time crunch at work - I might end up begging off for that alone, I’d like that time back.
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Nov 14, 2019 20:13
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Never assume anything at work is anonymous or “off the record”
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Nov 14, 2019 21:23
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Zaphod42 posted:
We do.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:36
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Pollyanna posted:Apparently it’s sanctioned by HR and since it’s opt-in it’s not anonymous, so What are they gonna do? Fire you for saying you're unhappy?
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Nov 15, 2019 00:55
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rt4 posted:What are they gonna do? Fire you for saying you're unhappy? 
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Nov 15, 2019 01:17
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ratbert90 posted:We do. Then why do you have set releases?
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Nov 15, 2019 01:21
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Zaphod42 posted:Then why do you have set releases? Once every two weeks, as per sprint planning. Also what I work on controls high voltage things. So everything has to go through QA.
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Nov 15, 2019 01:22
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Thread: https://twitter.com/oktopushup/status/1030457487034593280
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Nov 15, 2019 01:45
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As a user, I 
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Nov 15, 2019 01:51
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Some days you're just too real, erowidrecruiter. https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter/status/1195170303577448448
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Nov 15, 2019 11:37
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I actually do want to use OAuth a lot of the time
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Nov 15, 2019 15:22
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He's not batting a thousand but he'd still make the hall of fame
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Nov 15, 2019 17:46
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spacebard posted:Some days you're just too real, erowidrecruiter. I mean ... eventually I probably do. And I can't help but think of the Stefon SNL clip where he says "If you’re some dumb folks looking to get murdered"
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Nov 15, 2019 18:47
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Github is going to take a snapshot of all active open souce repos on 02/02/2020 and will store that on some special long lasting film reels in a deep Norwegian vault where it's believed to last 1000 years. I wonder what historians 1000 years from now will say about us. Edit: Link https://archiveprogram.github.com/ Carbon dioxide fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 19:39
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See, people have been having problems naming variables for millennia!
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Nov 15, 2019 19:44
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Carbon dioxide posted:I wonder what historians 1000 years from now will say about us. "Why did they pray to this god 'WIP' so often?"
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Nov 15, 2019 19:47
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Carbon dioxide posted:
That it was dumb we had to go access those files 18 months later because no one had a good backup strategy.
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Nov 15, 2019 21:06
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Lockback posted:That it was dumb we had to go access those files 18 months later because no one had a good backup strategy. Hey, if backups exist at all you're one step ahead of where you could be.
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Nov 16, 2019 05:23
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Carbon dioxide posted:I wonder what historians 1000 years from now will say about us. bold of you to assume that there'll be historians 1000 years from now
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Nov 16, 2019 05:36
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CPColin posted:"Why did they pray to this god 'WIP' so often?" To keep away his nemesis, "TODO"
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Nov 16, 2019 05:58
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The number of historians that will have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of XKCD in 4095 to decipher the code that powers their aging Thorium nuclear power plants will make NASA look like a backyard project.
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Nov 16, 2019 06:03
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redleader posted:bold of you to assume that there'll be historians 1000 years from now It didn't say human historians... (*An oversized cockroach continues to struggle with Emacs shortcuts while trying to decipher somebody's golfed FizzBuzz*)
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Nov 16, 2019 11:02
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Hollow Talk posted:It didn't say human historians... They wouldn’t have any trouble, you know how many legs they have
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Nov 17, 2019 07:37
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The tapes will be shunned as a haunted trap after one of them fails to return from VIM and the rescue team is similarly lost
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Nov 17, 2019 16:05
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