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Because I felt it was detracting from the Coding horrors thread I have created the PM and agile horrors thread. Please post awful practices your workplace has here and discuss them. Before you post, keep the following in mind: - All project management methodologies are terrible. - Agile is terrible - Waterfall is old and terrible - All managers are bastards.
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Sep 28, 2015 10:50
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I once took an "agile developer"role at a Pension Software firm (yes they may be running your pensions) Agile apparently meant Every morning the team stands around for 10 minutes waiting for the head of operations to turn up. Then he tells everyone what they are doing Then we do it. Stand ups are too short to have discussion or any input from the team. and if you want to refactor any code please liase with the head developer who is working off site 300 miles away and he was a "its my baby" dev who refused to accept any changes.. I left after 2 months (I also won an award for my first month there as going above and beyond the call of duty by staying late my first week to help the existing team fix the issues (and i had never seen the code base before)
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Sep 28, 2015 10:56
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Not agile or anything but: I once took an "internship" at an online mmorpg publisher. In California. My supervisor spoke only Korean and very very little English. My summer group was basically all Korean but me so the guy just held planning meetings in Korean. One of the other interns took pity and translated for me afterward. The codebase was commented in a mix of English, Korean, and mojibake because every other person had a different encoding set of euc-KR and utf-8 and ascii, and enough of it required asking someone that spoke Korean what the gently caress something did.
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Sep 28, 2015 15:38
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Just received the agenda for today's standup  Biowarfare posted:Not agile or anything but: Hmm i think your avatar has identified your former employer hehe.
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Sep 29, 2015 00:50
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OK Contra Duck, so for your new project we're giving you a team of 7 developers and we've already committed to an end date of March next year. Also the scope is completely locked down and there's no way to change anything. Also we're only giving you 2 developers for the first 3 months. And make sure we do it agile.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:34
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Hi I'm your new client. I'm very excited that we're going to be doing this agile thing but please take understand that we will need 7-10 days to make even the simplest of decisions.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:37
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Dear corporation: As a technical consultant, I would really like it if you would sign this contract saying that my team of experts can deliver "eh, whatever" every "two weeks" until you "go bankrupt". Oh, you won't do that because you weren't born yesterday? Hm, well, do you know anyone with budgetary authority who are also idiots? Your competitor's IT department? Great, thanks!
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Sep 29, 2015 08:09
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Contra Duck posted:Hi I'm your new client. I'm very excited that we're going to be doing this agile thing but please take understand that we will need 7-10 days to make even the simplest of decisions. they obviously don't get agile, part of the pain with agile is whilst developers sign up the management is still under the remit of them versus us, rather than we all work together
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Sep 29, 2015 08:36
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scrum sprints on skype with your freelancer dot com team at 3 am
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Sep 29, 2015 09:02
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i think it might be possible for scrum to be used in a non-hosed up organization, but every badgile place talks about scrum non-loving-stop. Like, the scrum and all the crap that goes along with it (like planning poker, scrum masters) is a red flag in my book when joining an organization. Recognize warning signs: 1. Scrum masters and people with scrum master certificates. 2. Old people. Old people loving love scrum as much as they love 8 am standup meetings. 3. Story points, user stories, velocity. 4. Planning poker. Bonus points if you're given special planning poker playing cards. 5. Microsoft Team Foundation server's scrum TFS template that makes no goddamn sense (as opposed to using index cards) 6. Project hasn't actually released code that gets used by customers in six years, still somehow agile. 7. Kanban. I don't even know what that is but we do it now, can't tell the difference. Bruegels Fuckbooks fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 03:44
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Kanban is an inventory management thing I think - something tied up with Lean Manufacturing and all that jazz.
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Sep 30, 2015 03:56
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Some of the things under the umbrella of Agile make sense and if you take the religious parts out they are good ideas without the Agile kool-aid. The problem is to implement those ideas you basically need buy-in from everybody in the business and sometimes the customer.
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Sep 30, 2015 04:38
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comedyblissoption posted:Some of the things under the umbrella of Agile make sense and if you take the religious parts out they are good ideas without the Agile kool-aid. The problem is to implement those ideas you basically need buy-in from everybody in the business and sometimes the customer. Agile methodologies actually make a ton of sense if you get down to the core of what they're saying. Kanban, Six Sigma, Scrum, whatever are all about identifying where the company is loving up and fixing the problems. The issue is that most business people's actual job description is "blame failures on other people, take credit for successes" which goes completely against the core of these methodologies and they end up loving it all up.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:09
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Blotto Skorzany posted:Kanban is an inventory management thing I think - something tied up with Lean Manufacturing and all that jazz. The places I've used it, it's basically a task tracker with (physical or virtual) cards. 'Here's what needs to be done on the left, here's what I'm working on right now in the middle, once it's done it goes over to the right in the 'done' column'. Mostly used during standups for discussing what you did yesterday/will do today. It actually works quite well, in my experience.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:59
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:i think it might be possible for scrum to be used in a non-hosed up organization, but every badgile place talks about scrum non-loving-stop. Like, the scrum and all the crap that goes along with it (like planning poker, scrum masters) is a red flag in my book when joining an organization. While I wouldn't wish it on anybody I have a morbid curiosity about SAFe, has anyone endured it? This chart is available as a 5'x3' printable pdf you can hang up in the office. 
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Sep 30, 2015 19:58
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"Agile Architecture" lmao Also, with all this mention of Epics in that picture I would be very disappointed if there weren't some epithets getting tossed around at every standup. "Well boss, I was going to go straight back from your office to my office to get back to work but I got sidetracked for over twenty minutes when Bob, that teller of tales, detained me at his desk for twenty long minutes. When I arrived back at my desk, some jackasses from ops were loving with my computer and flirting with cautious Alice and my office mates didn't even recognize me, save Steve - oh my SDET! - who helped me overthrow the usurpers, cut their balls off and feed them to the dogs (remember it was take your dog to work day today). Then discrete and wise Alice and I went to one of the meeting rooms and played ping-pong on that table I built. So you can see I was busy that whole time."
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Sep 30, 2015 20:19
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Destroyenator posted:While I wouldn't wish it on anybody I have a morbid curiosity about SAFe, has anyone endured it? This chart is available as a 5'x3' printable pdf you can hang up in the office. I'm passingly familiar with SAFe. It seems insane to me but some of my colleagues are big fans.  At the end of the day it's really just "coordinating multiple agile teams" as far as I know, though.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:23
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I don't get how "budgets" is just a spinning disk with arrows pointing places, budgets are literally what IT people live and die by. (supposedly)
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Sep 30, 2015 20:51
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I think that's supposed to be a pie chart, not a spinning disk
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Sep 30, 2015 20:56
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Blotto Skorzany posted:I think that's supposed to be a pie chart, not a spinning disk I think it means you take a train to Vegas with the budget and put it on the roulette tables.
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Sep 30, 2015 23:04
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Destroyenator posted:While I wouldn't wish it on anybody I have a morbid curiosity about SAFe, has anyone endured it? This chart is available as a 5'x3' printable pdf you can hang up in the office. That's amazing. Agile is literally just a set of tools to help you break down your big project into a bunch of tiny, discrete work items because that's easier to work with and to manage, but doing that requires discipline so instead let's just focus exclusively on process until we descend into madness and failure.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:35
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There is a lot of that going around: But we followed the procedure to the letter, why isn't it a success?!!
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Oct 1, 2015 05:28
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Ithaqua posted:I'm passingly familiar with SAFe. It seems insane to me but some of my colleagues are big fans. SAFe is actually pretty nice. That diagram's actually supposed to be an interactive piece where you click on something and it goes into more detail. This (http://www.scaledagileframework.com/budgets/) is what you get when you click on the pie chart. It talks about some of the pitfalls with project based budgeting and describes alternatives. It's not as specific as it looks like it might be, it's more about providing a complete architecture for the company rather than having the dev team on agile but everyone else around them is working differently. I don't work at a company that follows it but I've heard of companies doing well with it.
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Oct 1, 2015 05:56
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Too long; didn't read.
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Oct 1, 2015 11:20
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feedmegin posted:The places I've used it, it's basically a task tracker with (physical or virtual) cards. 'Here's what needs to be done on the left, here's what I'm working on right now in the middle, once it's done it goes over to the right in the 'done' column'. Mostly used during standups for discussing what you did yesterday/will do today. It actually works quite well, in my experience. Another quick summary of Kanban: you have a board with a series of columns in them, each representing a state that a task can be in. For example, "Ready for Development", "In Development", "Ready for QA", "In QA", "Ready to Demo", and "Complete". Tasks are represented by cards (or some equivalent). When you are ready to change a card from one state for another (for example, you as a developer are ready to start work on a new card), you pull the top card from the column and move it over. So, in that example, a developer is ready to start work. She pulls the top card from "Ready for Development" and moves it to "In Development". Then she works on it. When she thinks she's done, she moves the card to "Ready for QA". Then, whenever a QA person is available to do something, he pulls the top card from "Ready for QA" and moves it to "In QA". If it passes QA, it moves to "Ready to Demo", otherwise it gets rejected back to "Ready for Development". There are, of course, a million variants on this. You can limit the number of cards in any state, have various states, have "swim lanes", which are ways of grouping cards together as they march across the board, and so on. Handling defects vs. rejections can sometimes take discussion, but the QA involved would generally talk with the dev involved, and they would make a decision. One of the benefits of Kanban is that it is very visual. You can look at a Kanban board for your team and get a pretty good idea of what people are currently working on, and what is highest priority to do next (assuming somewhere along the line you have someone manage that priority). I'm sure it can be done poorly, but in my experience, it does a pretty good job of empowering a team to manage their work and avoiding bureaucratic overhead while getting things done. Some people get their panties wet over metrics you can supposedly gleam from it, but in my experience, developers usually couldn't care less.
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Oct 2, 2015 03:38
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That's not actually kanban. Kanban is about inventory management. If you had a supply of parts in a manufacturing plant, then there'd be a "parts" card in the manufacturing lane. When you run out, you move that card to supply (because it's out), supply moves a new bin (with a card) to manufacturing and sends the empty part bin (with the card) to the supplier lane. When the supplier gets the parts to storage then storage gets the card. The point is that you can have only two "parts" cards that stay in the system, reducing held inventory and still making it obvious when things are going slow. The software design concept just takes the board and does some unrelated stuff with it.
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Oct 2, 2015 04:04
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I love the former project manager of mine who made every new hire read Goldratt's The Goal, and then for all their lean manufacturing talk, we did the whole thing in your typical agilefall fashion. Each 4-week sprint was even its own waterfall project unto itself, with 1 week requirements gathering, 2 weeks dev, 1 week QA, last day merge to the WIP system.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:15
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NovemberMike posted:That's not actually kanban. Kanban is about inventory management. ... Fair. I should have been more clear that I was discussing what's called Kanban in the software development world. Unfortunately, I don't have a particularly better term for it.
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Oct 2, 2015 14:56
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I never understood where the name came from. "Kanban" is literally just the Japanese word for "signboard"
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Oct 2, 2015 15:39
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Suspicious Dish posted:I never understood where the name came from. "Kanban" is literally just the Japanese word for "signboard" Everything that has to do with "Lean Manufacturing" came from Toyota, more or less
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Oct 2, 2015 15:49
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The way I understand it, a Kanban board is a sprint board that is continuous instead of time-boxed. Instead of doing sprints, you "pull" work from the backlog and set limits for each stage to ensure you aren't juggling too many tasks. If you are at capacity in a certain stage, then no more work can be pulled. The "pull" process is what makes Kanban "special". This explains it better than I can: https://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2009/08/05/how-to-get-started-with-kanban-in-software-development/
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Oct 2, 2015 16:13
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we try to use kanban at work but we use this thing called huboard which seems to freeze for 10 minutes when opening so i never use it
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Oct 2, 2015 16:29
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Oh god, I had first-hand experience with this recently. Ithaqua posted:I'm passingly familiar with SAFe. It seems insane to me but some of my colleagues are big fans. That's my understanding, though while I've seen it make individual teams work better together, it didn't solve the friction between teams, and it actually increased, since the teams were empowered to make their own organisation, sprint timings and technical decisions. The result was that it was even harder to deliver between the individual times.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:24
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Ithaqua posted:I'm passingly familiar with SAFe. It seems insane to me but some of my colleagues are big fans. Most of the agile movement really pushes the buy in at all levels. Scrum™ pretty much says "if you don't have buy in you will fail no matter what" in a pre-emptive no true Scotsman defence. Obviously once agile became a buzz word there opened up a huge market for a way to introduce it to "enterprise" organisations in a way that was palatable to the structures in place. Lots of the efforts focussed on "guerrilla" introductions and "changing them from the inside" which make for great blog posts and talks but good luck dealing with that in practice. In terms of coordinating teams we started getting "scrum-of-scrums" and the Spotify cult but no real clear answer. And then SAFe seemed to appear on the scene fully formed with an agile implementation that fitted with enterprise bureaucracy, that handles large scale development across remote teams, that was complex enough to justify expensive training and consultants, and trendy enough that middle managers could be "forward thinking" but safe enough (see it's right there in the name!) that they weren't taking too big a risk. The marketing is almost too slick, and the literature seems to be aimed at middle/upper management who will just push the button and suddenly everyone gets two days training and buys some handbooks and then the teams under them are running "agile", huge headline point for that next performance review. But as I said I haven't seen it in practice or taken the training, there's usually a few good ideas in each of these frameworks, and anywhere that switches to it was probably worse off beforehand anyway so good luck to them.
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Oct 2, 2015 22:04
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From a friend:quote:new world record: 40 minute standup And yes they were standing up.
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Nov 11, 2015 05:03
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PM: "I'm worried that the CSM on our partner team is judging me when I do Scrum wrong." "Maybe you should stop doing it wrong?"
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Nov 11, 2015 07:33
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Buddy of mine interviewed at a defense contractor some time ago and was told "oh, we're faster than agile". He made sure he never got a callback.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:10
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40 minutes is so far from the world record for a standup.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:10
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Project management? What's that? Oh, that's the thing that I; as the new guy; must implement for the 6+ people engineering department that handles a few million lines of terrible code? Sure thing!
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Nov 11, 2015 18:35
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lmao I've experienced multiple standup arguments that lasted longer than an hour Also maybe this is the place to post that I've been arguing with a QA tester all day that I should't have to break form validation just because they arbitrarily chose unrealistic inputs. As in, it probably wouldn't be an issue if the production UI didn't let people enter the internal-only URLs the test cases they wrote themselves specify, but noooo I'm in the wrong so we need to schedule a meeting to discuss this with the PM so we can get the 'bug' fixed this sprint.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:35
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