Ludic 🧛Jul 2, 2024

I'm currently watching someone use story points as time estimates (1 point = 1 day), but ALSO using the heuristic that 5 points is too much (which is for when story points represent complexity), so now no one is ever allowed to work on one thing for five days.

💀

I move ever closer to my villain arc.

Show threadDethrone DogJul 2, 2024

@ludicity Definitely it's an issue if developers are getting into trouble for going over the estimate. Management will likely get the opposite of what they want out of that move, as developers pad their estimates.

Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to me to break up a task into components at the outset if you think it will take more than a week. Looking back at my career I can't remember any time when I had a branch open longer than a week and it was a good idea.

Show threadLudic 🧛Jul 2, 2024

@sanedragon I never had a week-long branch on a functional team, yeah.

Where I'm seeing that get janky now is when it's at a place that has already let engineering discipline slip, because it becomes really hard to fix really gnarly architectural mistakes in 3 day increments. Like, totally untested codebase, database access is provisioned through a spreadsheet, it is HARD to come up with a plan I can deliver piecemeal.

Show threadDethrone Dog
@ludicity Oof, no tests makes it rough. Fixing that has to be a top priority. Hard to convince management that you need to spend time on changes they can't see, though. I don't envy your position.
Jul 2, 2024 at 3:41amWeb
Show threadLudic 🧛Jul 3, 2024
@sanedragon Yeah, it's tricky, but there are worse things to be doing I suppose! The main reason it's frustrating is, of course, that having to do all that teaching means you're not learning that much. It's a hard struggle in Melbourne to find a team to learn from.