Patricia AasMay 25
This whole Agile Coach debacle has helped me realize something that hadn’t fully landed with me before: agile started as a movement driven by builders to «build better», but it is largely dominated now with people who don’t know how to build and look at agile as a management process style. These are MBA-like folks who are trying to figure out how to manage an IT organization. But that wasn’t what agile was about. It was about a better way to build stuff, better stuff, by collaboration and not getting stuck in our ways.
Show threadMorten GrøftehaugeMay 25
@Patricia Yeah, the parts are good.
- Break projects into tasks and task into smaller parts
- Go quickly to a product (so you can talk to end user)
- Being attention to when you need something from coworker or vendor to progress
Show threadPatricia AasMay 25
@drgroftehauge Tbh I think «breaking something into subtasks» is often an illusion. Some things that we know how to do sure, but a lot of dev is figuring out stuff we don’t know and there is no way to break that down. And we have not been great at explaining that.
Show threadjjjMay 25
@Patricia @drgroftehauge Thank you for saying this. When I switched to software development and was told to estimate points and to break up stories, my reaction was that that's not how it works. Or rather, that is not the process when I'm working. But still, I had to. Now I am pretty good at playing the game, to get the job done.
Show threadPatricia AasMay 25

@jjj @drgroftehauge I am of two minds on estimation (plus a personal observation):
1. As an individual dev this is mostly a meaningless exercise
2. As a person who has plumbers and electricians etc in my house occasionally, I have no idea if plan A vs plan B takes takes 2 weeks vs 2 days, and that might be a big part of my decision on which way to go.

Observation: in early agile I was on a team trying many things, and one was estimating, but we didn’t share these estimates outside the team, as numbers they had no meaning, the work took the time it took. But estimating as a group brought out new information (why do you say 1 day and I say 1 month?), and also it made collaboration easier, because everyone had a rough idea about all the stuff we were doing as a group.

Show threadPatricia AasMay 25
@jjj @drgroftehauge but it’s like every stat collected: the moment you use it for something, it influences the data.
Show threadJohn-Mark Gurney

@Patricia

I'm not sure how much my previous manager used the data, but after a couple of years at it, the team got good at pointing (if it takes longer than a couple days break it down even more) and apparently our velocity (how many points per week) was steady, and our point got reliable.

So it could be used for planning, but also, you couldn't plan out very far, as you can't necessarily know if that 2 week task really will take that, but at the same time you know if you can get the work done in the next month or not.

It did take a couple of years to get a smooth rhythm with the process.

@jjj @drgroftehauge

May 26 at 4:52pmWeb