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Let's get rid of the developer training: Pair Programming
Let's get rid of the software testers: Test First Programming
Let's get rid of the project managers: Agile
Let's get rid of the project planners: Scrum
Let's get rid of the system admins: DevOps
Let's get rid of the security guys: DevOpsSec
Let's get rid of the hardware budget: Bring Your Own Device
Let's get rid of the servers: Cloud Computing
Let's get rid of the other scruffy guys: Outsourcing
Let's get rid of the office space: Home Office
Let's get rid of the whole fucking company: Takeover8 -
1. I join a company.
2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.
3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.
4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.
5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.
6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc
7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.
8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.
Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".
In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.
A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.
The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.
9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.14 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
Manager: I need estimates for your sprint tasks
Me: I've never done any of this before, my estimates have no context and are effectively worthless
Manager: don't worry it's just for the Jira board.
Me: OK *gives estimates*
End of sprint comes...
Manager: Why isn't task X done?
Me: *sigh*
I don't miss my old job :)
3 -
/* Daily sit down meeting */
What did you work on yesterday?
- Tea
What are you working on today?
- Tea
Any road blocks?
- *sips tea* ...nah no11 -
We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!
Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!
You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.
We're building some pyramids.
What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!
Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?
We require a giant pyramid.
For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.
The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.
Now go build already!20 -
Let's build a house with no blueprint, no idea how it should look but have daily meetings about the bathroom... #Scrum3
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Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.
I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.
If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.
Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.
But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.
Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.6 -
I think I figured out why so many companies jumped on board the Agile approach. Companies heard Productivity Bonus and Put Stuff into a List Of Things to Do, and left out all the rest of their responsibilities. One of my past companies was like "We're going to take an Agile approach to everything! Except, we're not going to shield developers from everyone who has stuff in the backlog, and we're going to have other meetings during the day on top of the scrum meetings to check on your progress, and we're going to measure points in time instead of complexity".
I feel like the creators of the Agile Manifesto would be really upset at all of the poorly implemented processes. Because all of us developers are pretty upset.6 -
The next big trend will be in the area of project management:
The Waterfall™
Agile has been abused to the point where The Waterfall™ is way more agile! Think about it: It's straight down. No loops, no unnecessary hourly, daily, weekly meetings. No micromanaging. Just one flow. It starts at the top and it's all downhill from there.
Pure efficiency!
Edit: Wake up developers! The management doesn't want you to know this simple efficiency trick!9 -
Scrum Master: Let's estimate the task. Chose your estimations individually, then we will reveal at the same time and discuss
- variety of votes, ranging from 1 to 8
Product Owner: I don't agree, this should be a 1 or 2.
Dev Team Lead: Agreed, this is why I chose 2. Let's vote again.
- All votes now are 1s or 2s
Good fucking job 🤨11 -
worst part of working in scrum: trying to remember what you worked on Friday for Monday morning's stand-up meeting.2
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No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.
I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.
I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.
I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.
I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.
I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.
I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.
I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.
Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.
See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?
Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.
Hugs and kisses,
Platypus15 -
sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.
they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.
i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.
independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.
so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ16 -
this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.
I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.
There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.
There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.
Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.
I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.
I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.
I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.
And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.
I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.
I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.
My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.
On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.
I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.
I think I'm fucked25 -
Why does Scrum feel like micromanagement?
I seriously hate daily standup, ours go on for half an hour, sometimes longer and I have to listen to completely unrelated shit I don't know anything about. I cannot explain how disconnected I feel. I'm the only dev working on their website. Some days I don't even need to check in, I have nothing to say.24 -
First, they came for those who Open Source'd code.
And I did not speak out, because my code could never be used by anyone out of the company, anyway.
Then, they came for the Trade Unionists.
And I did not speak out, because I was not in a union.
Then, they came for those who worked from home.
And I did not speak out, because I was granted an exception.
Then, they came for Scrum Masters and other Agile practitioners.
And I did not speak out, because fuck those spreadsheet jockeys productivity thespians.
Then, they came for in-house Data Analysts and Data Engineers.
And there was no one left to speak out for us.
Yeah, folks. The day finally came. I'm officially updating my LinkedIn and putting a ridiculous sash under my picture, "open to work". The Layoffs came for me, too.6 -
Who holds the #1 Google spot for these queries?
fuck c#: devRant
fuck typescript: devRant
fuck xcode: devRant
fuck product owner: devRant
fuck docker: reddit (devRant is 2)
fuck java: reddit (devRant is 2)
fuck agile: reddit (devRant is 2)
fuck scrum: reddit (devRant is 2)
fuck sql: reddit (devRant is 2)
fuck node: reddit (devRant is 3)
fuck php: github (devRant is 4)
fuck python: github (devRant is 4)
fuck clojure: reddit (devRan't didn't rank on first page)
fuck rust: reddit (devRant didn't rank on first page)
fuck scala: reddit (devRant didn't rank on first page)
fuck ruby: **am I still connected to the company VPN? I might have some explaining to do** (devRant didn't rank)12 -
So...my first experience with Scrum. How many fucking energy and productivity draining meetings can you squeeze in to two weeks?!!!! Agile? Hahaha. Don't get me started! Leave me alone and let me get some work done!4
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Agile is cool but management likes to screw it up by trying to micromanage. This usually starts but making an inexperienced pm your scrum master. They control all meetings and turn daily standup to a 30 minute interrogation session.1
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Client: we are using Scrum. Next week we have sprint review organized by the project manager.
Me: it’s not Scrum.
Client: in the next sprint we work on a mockup not releasable in production.
Me: it’s not Scrum.
Client: sprint backlog is changed again, at the end we must do everything that is written in the contract with that fixed amount of money.
Me: definitely not Scrum.
Client: we are using Scrum.
Me: Ok.1 -
For the first time I am feeling like.... I hate my job.
Agile and Scrum can be fucked, but at least there is a work methodology. I was hired by a company being run the old school way.
These guys never heard of git??
- Fuck you. We never used git and neither should you.
Client company does not want to give me push/pull access to their gitlab instance??
- Fuck you, you can use our RDP server for that.
Project planning features be damned, they've got email, Teams and videocalls!
Can I develop in peace? Fuck no, I have to give IT support to the guy who hired me.
Our timeline is defined IN A FUCKING WORD DOCUMENT FOR FUCKS SAKE. I can't connect Issues to milestones in a Word doc
Oh, and the customer is running everything on prem. If there is a need to scale up, FUCK ME. I should have specified 20 machines from the get go or gtfo. We're using 2 machines to run 8 different services that are going to be ingesting and computing data.
They want state of the art on a cheapskate.
And I have nothing else lined up at the moment. Although I am soon to renew the contract... This contract binds me with professional responsibility for a project being ran by people who do not give a single fuck about optimizing the work process.3 -
Scrum is terrible. Is there another agile technique that isn't as bad? Like maybe one that will let us do our "scrum" once a week for like an hour? My current project really doesn't lend itself to once a day scrums. Literally my scrum input is "I worked on what I have been working on, and I'm gonna work on it more today. Impediments are literally the same as they always are because my life is no longer my own."5
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Scrum. And agile. And people over-communicating. And estimating work complexity on a prototype. And people in general. I like nights, when all annoying people just shut the fuck up and sleep.1
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U know this guy, whos Shady AS FUCK..
He waited until the end of the daily(when noone was putting attention) to make an agreement with the PO about some decisions of the user history..
He doesnt even know WTF is doing, so he wanted to swap his user history for another one..
U & ALL THE PEOPLE WHO NEVER WORK WITH THE TEAM & USE PRIVATES CHATS TO CONTROL OTHERS!
FUCK U!!3 -
A delicious Sprint Planning 😋
It was a hard sprint (SCRUM methodology), but finally we were on our next’s sprint planning meeting. We had a lot of tasks to define and estimate. For the first one, we all estimated the task with 5 points, and for the second one we voted for 3 points. We were coordinated XD so, our boss said “let’s do something, if all of you vote, let’s say, 5, and another votes for a different number, he or she’s gonna buy us a six pack of beer”. Challenge accepted.
Two partners and I have to buy beers for this friday after work 😂 I don’t even mad 😋🍻
3 -
Infinity is defined by the time it takes for a group of developers to reach an agreement about what is the "Definition of Done".3
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A coworker during scrum today: "Last week, I worked on the new feature. Also, I have an announcement for everyone: I'm going through a divorce so I moved in with my parents and will be working remotely for a while. I have no blockers...except for the divorce."1
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The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.
So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.
Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!5 -
We use scrum in our company.
And with scrum I mean we don't have a scrum master, our senior developer is the project owner, we estimate in hours and the estimate is binding, so you are not allowed to work longer on a task than the estimate.
So yeah.. "scrum"4 -
Please tell me something wrong with me, and whole world is working like that! It can't be right! Or could it, and I'm just one sad fuck who don't know shit?
So... We've got:
1. Jira reporting (agile style with cards and shit)
2. Task timers (via application integrated to Jira in order to count how much time we spent on a task)
3. End of the day email reporting with description of what we have done today (Jira is not enough?)
4. Daily morning meetings with a team leader to report what we're gonna do today
5. Git merge code reviews for each finished component (that lasts for hours)
6. Weekly status meetings
7. Working hours reporting with a fucking fingerprint
And on top of all of that, the developer is the one who just writes the code - team leader decides how this code is gonna look, what will be written first and what last, what libraries will be used and so on...8 -
This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.
We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.
Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.
Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.
Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.
Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.
Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.
At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.4 -
I'm a developer with scrum master certification but the company wanted me to use their existing google spreadsheet for managing the tasks of 60 developers. I study agile for nothing. Kill me now please. I'm out.5
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This is my first time experiencing agile development with its daily scrum meets, and I hate it already.2
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I googled "scrum sucks" and now I can see a pattern described as an argument against the whole scrum/agile/whatever thing, which is already happening since we started adopting agile: we're consciously incurring technical debt and being allowed to create a mess out of the previously existing code architecture just to "get this ticket out of the way"
We're also refraining from acting immediately on negative user feedback on a feature just released, which I think can wear user perception of the company as a whole, all because it's "not the focus" of the current sprint9 -
Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?
And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.
A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.
My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.
And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.
"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?
Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.
And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."
I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.
I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.
And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.
In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.
I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.8 -
Scrum Master? More like Scum Master.. The nutjob sends a calendar invite for daily stand up for 30 minutes which extends to 50 minutes.. 50 minutes for a team of 6 people ? Fuck off.6
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Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.
Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.
Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.
I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.1 -
On a scale of 0 to who fucking cares, how important is it to stand on your feet during dailies?
I really hope this company never hires someone who uses a wheelchair.9 -
I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?5 -
Our agile scrum team has finally shattered into two parts.
On the one hand we have front-end guys.
On the other hand we have backend- /dev-ops guys.
The FE guys don't care about the BE guys business.
They don't join pairworking and only noticing things that went bad, when a Backend guy has caused it.
Goodbye fullstack dev-ops team...
I really dislike that arrogant basterds.
Frontend Hobo-Bitches...! -
Job BS that made me consider quitting?
Huh. so timely.
With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.
At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />
On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh. -
I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...
So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).
Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.
Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.
What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...
The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.
The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.
Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.
One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...
Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.
Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.
Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..
ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....
Ahh yess....
Clean code..
Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...
I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.
OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..
Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.
15 -
Fuck me I'm pissed. This sprint, my tech lead has been away and a senior dev has been covering for him. We plan a load of work and distribute stories and we churn threw it quite well. However, my senior dev says let's not deploy until all the works done. I was like, how is it going to be tested? He was like well it will be fine because it's all one test. Bs. We now have 2 days left, tester is getting stressed because they don't know what to test or what's been finished. Scrum master is asking why all of it should be tested at the same time and I'm here like this is fucking dumb. Also the tester decided to start testing with the most complex piece of work, rather than prioritising.
Starting to wonder if I'm just the outsider or whether no one understands that granularity is better.2 -
When scrum master/agile coach sais "I know, I used to be a developer myself." ....
Do they think it makes me trust them and drop my point?
Honestly all I think is "well, plenty of bad devs out there, and there's a reason you'r not doing it anymore"3 -
Agile/Scrum is the worst project management style in software development.
Rather than focusing on delivering a feature or changes on the project, everyday there is always a meeting that you need to attend to, other than the daily huddle. And those meetings are none of your concern or why they needed you there
And my Product Owner and Scrum Master does not know even though how software development cycle works. When you discuss technical details or constraint to them, they either look confused or don’t know what to say and just say “If you need anything, always communicate or approach me” even you already told them the issue.
Or maybe we are doing it wrong. But it is been 5 years when they implement this Agile/Scrum and we are still bad at it.
Just ranting4 -
What a week... I feel like I am on here ranting more than usual.
The Marketing Director and Project Manager keep telling me to let them know when I am stuck on tasks so they can unblock for me, but I FUCKING DO. I don't understand why they keep telling me to speak up, because I use multiple channels to tell those who are the blockers that I need an update.
I add comments on my Monday.com tickets and @ the relevant people, I send MS Teams chats to them, we even have a daily standup where I mention that I am stuck, as well as a OneNote daily update that gets sent to management where I mention that I am stuck and tag the people who need to help me out.
I have been stuck on a task for two sprints, which should have taken me a couple of days to do.
I really feel like I'm talking to brick walls, am I that unimportant? This is supposed to be "agile scrum kanban blah blah blah sprints story points people over process bullshit". I hate it. Y'all are doing it wrong... Fuckin robots.
I need a fuckin drink, thank God it's Friday.7 -
Newbie Agile Team: "Hi Scrum Coach, we studied and implemented the Scrum methodology, but we are late as before and our software is buggy and shitty as ever, how is that?"
Agile Coach: "Scrum Methodology is easy to learn, but difficult to master!"
Newbie Agile Team (chorus): "Oh coach, Fuck yourself daily, with your coffe thermos, standing up and once per week retrospectively. If you'll come at the next review meeting, we will gangbang your ass in front of the stakeholders"5 -
I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".
Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.
Why thank you.
Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.
Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."
It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.1 -
The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"
Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."
If it was so great, why didn't you stay?
We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.3 -
So my team got this new clueless "Delivery manager" who doesn't know ANYTHING ABOUT AGILE!
Her favourite timepass ? To eat development team's time asking stupid questions just to make her presence felt. And she does that by visiting each developer personally. MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY !
Why can't you leave the team and let them do some actual work??😑
She would join our scrum meetings to ask questions like "what are story points again?", "How do we calculate team velocity?"
Dear miss Clueless: It's not cool to be dumb! It's cool to take up an online agile crash course if you insist to contribute.
The other day, she suggested a QA guy to "test properly" with a smirk!
I mean seriously ? Was that actually necessary to tell them? This team was working just perfect without you. How about you look before you leap?
I try being nice to her but at times it's just too much to take. -
Don't you just love estimating the story points of a ticket that is completely irrelevant to your role. How do I estimate work that I have never done in my life? 🙄4
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Trying to understand why do I have a course on Software Engineering which consists 80% of lectures on what Agile and Scrum mean.
Why can't we get to implement a project and work on agile as we go? 😐😣7 -
I find Scrum Masters useless. I'd rather have a developer replace them. Am I overseeing their value? Could someone enlighten me?
I also think that if a group comprised of smart people, things spontaneously happen without needing a handrail to walk along.4 -
I'll be starting a new job soon, and I'm sure there will be a chance to implement some form of process for the dev team to use...
To Scrum or to Kanban?2 -
Disclaimer: I am an assclown who makes cobbles shit together and doesn't have a strong/real foundational understanding in the shit I deal with.
So does anybody actually write their tests before they write their code? I see the term TDD (test driven development) bandied around everywhere.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing or what the solution will be, nor am I confident in it until I've manually tested it seems to be working.
Then I usually write the automated tests if they are easy to do so.
i.e. I won't know what/how to test the thing.....until I make the damn thing
Is this a case of 'git gud' and have the problem "presolved" in your head, before you work on it such that you can already write tests first?
Or is this a case of "aGilE", where everybody says they're agile, maybe does a little bit of scrum (just the pieces they like/find useful, not the entire thing in a dogmatic/religious way), and possibly has never heard of the manifesto https://agilemanifesto.org/12 -
Scream, the agile framework for when scrum would require too much change.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/... -
I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.
Three aspects why this sucks:
1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.
2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.
3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.
I'm just tired.4 -
8 months into a complex Agile project, managing multiple Scrum teams -
I still feel it would go much faster if I just do it myself.1 -
So my team (read: not the team at all) has decided that we are going to scrum. Someone ease tell me it's not as fucking tedious as it sounds. Sounds like it's just more meetings. Especially on this team which is actually already pretty agile. And the way our "certified scrum master" describes the retrospective sounds like it was designed by the type of shitlord PM that forces everyone to wear ugly t-shirts to the mandatory company barbecue for "team building". Please tell me he's just a terrible salesman.7
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*Email chain forwarded by support team to our dev team*
Hi,
Please assist our customer. He is unable to reset his password!
*Went through the emails turned out that customer is asking for password reset request for legacy website for which we don't work at all*
Scrum master sending another reply to look into the matter on High priority.
We again double checked for the customer but he is not registered on the new website.
Apparently, both scrum master and support team and entire company is aware that our team is not working for legacy website.
But No one reads the email properly and keep forwarding to dev team disturbing the entire team.
Some times things like this are done by product manager and her associate, but they keep replying to each other on unnecessary things till they come to conclusion and scrum master try hard to keep up with them with his own agile disciplines. -
I started my career almost 20 years ago now.
I had the chance to work in really good environments, and with people trying to be performant. In my first company, the CTO pushed a lot the new/shiny XP method. Then I used the first iterations of Scrum as a Team Leader.
As I became a Service Manager, I found my love in kanban/lean (and my worst nightmare in sigma six).
I crashed startups created with friends and cashed out sometimes.
I also did a lot of "agile consulting", around productivity, product methods, organization (even got certified SaFe, the Agile framework that states" process over people").
When I came back to Europe, I just wanted to get back to the level I was in North America.
I have done a lot of mentoring, but now I lack the motivation (and time) to keep doing it, the way I did. So I stopped.
And now I have to answer the question "do I leave delivery?". Also, it seems that a lot of actual organizations are starting to put the product under " tech top management" ( companies I like at least).
So I wonder, what my next evolution should be...
Should I leave tech delivery to be fully Top-Management...
Do I want to structure/handle/organize the Product Teams...
Covid has given me time to start thinking a lot more about my situation... And it sucks... -
Just a reminder guys especially who do agile(scrum). TEAMS SHOULD BE HIGHLY ALIGNED BUT LOOSELY COUPLED!5
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We had our first "real" sprint planning yesterday. This was a very superficial planning session, as my manager is, by the looks of it, not to keen on the whole "new process thing". Probably because it's not his way of doing things... or simply more simply put - this way round means he'll need find some new ways to crawl up the CTOs ass!
So glad I'm leaving! -
So I was attending a Scrum Master training recently. During the introduction, the coach is making sure everyone understands why are they even on this training and stresses out that for a company to be able to actually become agile and survive the transition, people of different levels and roles/responsibilities should get familiar with Scrum, not only IT/developers.
Coach: I can see we have developers, testers and people from operations in the room, good. Too bad there's noone from the actual business. Anyway, who decided that you should come to a Scrum training and become certified?
Group: Well, the business..
#ironic1 -
The company i work for is getting into scrum. Hired consultants, product owners and scrum masters. First action was 'lets spend 2 days in meetings estimating the rest of the project'.
Agile as fuck3 -
my boss doesn't believe in AGILE-SCRUM, hence android and back end is always out of sync and I always end up having to rewrite the code in order make it compatible with the back end, even though i have to post a new binary to the app store and play store not to mention get the users to actually update the damn app. How do I get my boss to adapt SCRUM?3
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Our team moved to scrum a while back. But everybody still does story point estimation by mentally assigning 1 story point for each day of work it would require. :/
On top of that, management compares the performance of two *different* scrum teams based on the story points they finish in a sprint. :// -
Just got done watching a 2 1/2 hours of Uncle Bob on programming. I really like his style of speaking. Great data and interesting viewpoints. Really easy to follow. I'd read some of his articles, but never listened to him before. Will definitely be watching more. For those of you in organizations using "agile" development and having a tough time of it, his talk called The Land that Scrum Forgot was really interesting.
And he really looks amazingly like my uncle, Tom, who's also been a programmer for decades! So I just think of him as Uncle Tom instead.1 -
Waterfall.
I string dislike the waterfall methodology and much prefer agile or scrum. And it's incredibly difficult that upper management only understands waterfall while claiming to know agile.
Meanwhile they want things completed by deadlines that are only possible with an agile approach. So you have a mishmash of upper management running waterfall with impossible deadlines and developers trying to meet those deadlines running in agile.
Anyone else have this problem? -
I'm absolutely fuming why on earth would someone try to apply exactly all rules of a theoretical concept. I hate those so called "scrum masters". We can't apply all rules of agile we're not machines. There's real life and theory.1
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Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.
I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..
We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..
Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea
We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.
Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..
Guess who has to do it in the end..
Many question marks about this project -
To give you some context, in the past year we have change managers 3 times. Obviously our process (we were trying to follow agile) has suffer the most with all these changes since it seems the managers that have been assigned to us are not really IT people.
We are using TFS (I know...) for our builds and for our scrum and kanban boards, only use developers and QA are really using the board and all the benefits that it provides and the managers are oblivious to what TFS is. I have tried offering them training and workshops but they just don't want to learn.
And now they want us to keep the requirement information on word documents and Excel instead. I'm not sure I can continue my battle against Word/Excel...
I understand they are valuable tools but... Is it really difficult to use a tool that was made specifically for that and it's as easy as filling some text fields and click a button? Why is it so hard to understand that if you want to know the status of a task is as simple as following a link where you can find all the related information?
I think I'm loosing it, even the other developer on my team is in support of using Word... of course the guy doesn't know agile and his cards on the board are shit making him work with QA all the time....
Feel like I'm alone here....4 -
Is there a team that works truly productive and happy via an agile (scrum) workflow?
Or does it always distill down to an excuse for a chaotic workflow?
My experience and cynic nature has let me to assume the latter.
(That being said, I never had a dedicated scrum master to work with. So that may be the first of many problems.)4 -
Estimates.. First, part of the team makes "high-level" estimates which are based on informal, incomplete, still-evolving specs and an unstable back-end. The project people report the estimates to the client and elevate the status of these inaccurate estimates to that of commitments.
Then, before the "sprint", we review our initial estimates *ahum commitments* in greater (technical) detail. Because there are still a lot of unknowns, we tend to estimate more buffer here (back-end is often not ready, always ping-pong between project people and dev-team about unclear specs, more work than originally expected, and often late modifications to the original spec).
When an estimate becomes more than 50% extra time at the "refinement", we are told: "sorry, we gotta do it in less" and when it doesn't work out, we're kindly asked to spend part of our weekend catching up at 100% pay rate (legally it's 150-200%).
FUCK THIS SHIT
*quotes used abundantly because these terms belong to "agile/scrum" terminology but we're only pretending -
I'm at that point where I want to lash out at our team for not finishing a sprint. I've been doing the scrum master/dev role for months now and each sprint is incomplete since we have started the agile way.
Most of my team members are seasoned senior devs and my team's downfall are caused by not acting as a team. I'm the youngest in the team and have been acting as a babysitter for them.3 -
*weekly team planning session, my first week*
They: "We don't estimate on effort required, we estimate on the number of unknowns"
Me: "How do you know unknowns?"
They: "Exactly. Also, we don't account for 0 unknowns."
Me: "What if it's a simple text change?"
They: "There's always unknowns."2 -
Our project using Agile methodology, we have every day stand-up meeting(scrum meeting) that normally end around 10 to 15 minutes with 7 ppl.
One day The Project Owner came and join our stand-up meeting that cost us like sprint planning
And The Project Owner did not stop there, he come again next day for the 1 week.
Because of that our product backlogs and Sprint Planning goes haywire.
We failed to delivery what we planned for that project. -
Have you ever worked for an organization that is not specialized in software development because that is not their main line of business, however, their products are software applications?
If you are, then hi you and me are in the same boat. Currently I have a nice manager and I'm acting as dev lead the strange thing I have a peer that is supposed to be lead as well but I cannot define his position....
In theory he should be scrum master / resource manager which fails at both terribly.
I ended up implementing Agile in the team and deciding what goes and not into the sprint based on quality while this guy just try to squeeze stuff into the sprint, the more the better even with all kinds or problems...
Honestly I'm not sure why he is still in the team since it seems like he only drains the budget, doesn't understand a thing about the products he is working on and every single idea he has is horrible.
Every meeting I have with him I always ended up asking myself "How can somebody be that stupid?" The lack of technical knowledge and even common sense is over 9000 in this one...
It might sound bitter from my end but after two years of dealing with this stupidness of getting people in software development that have no idea what software development is and understand the intricacies of it just because they did an access database or are good at excel is nonsense.
I'm at the verge of quitting and the only thing that is keeping me here is my manager and the fact that the products I am working with are pretty interesting.
Sorry for the long rant but I had to get it out of my chest before it explodes and I directly call out this person.
Not looking for suggestions but if anybody want to chime in go ahead.1 -
Had someone mention adding tasks to stories in our sprint mid-sprint is messing up the sprint statistics... Can someone explain to me how one is supposed to know every task and approximately how long it will take to complete for a given story before even opening the code base up?
This is currently my major gripe with agile / scrum. How exactly you're supposed to instinctively know the solution to a complicated problem, as well as the steps to implement it, the approximate time it'll take, AND roadblocks you'll run into on DAY ONE? WHAT?
Too often does a 2 point story turn into a 5 point story because deep down it was a more complicated problem than originally thought, and a good scrum developer is supposed to... Either clairvoyantly known that or just allocate hours into unrelated tasks?
Someone help me out here -
In a sprint planning meeting. Getting frustrated. I guess it's my fault. I guess I assumed that attending the same schedule meeting each week meant that we all knew when everything was due. My bad.
Seriously, I fucking hate systems people sometimes. We have 4 major tasks coming down the pipe, but they are scheduled in such a way in which they are staggered. But they want to punt the 1 of the 4 that is fucking done because it is going to cause a lot of testing, but the other three aren't coming til end of next month AT LEAST. So they want to stick their thumbs up their ass holes and wait to test the other three before testing the one that, again, IS FUCKING DONE!!! Are they worried that a super massive black hole will spontaneously form in earth's orbit and cause time to run backwards and somehow cause December to happen in October!?!?
No wonder systems is so fucking far behind. They can't see the forest for the trees. They're so big picture that months and years are at the same level of granularity. Fucking hell how is scrum better than our current agile process again? Besides the fact that it makes me attend more useless meetings and get more angry.
They are punishing the left hand for the actions of the right. Systems wasn't doing their job so now software has to slow down and miss schedule.2 -
Hi all,
I'm in this company for about 15 months. It's one of the big name company. I'm a senior dev here. In my team we follow agile development. In starting I was just working on my part mostly. Then my manager raised concern to me for not taking ownership and helping others.
I started doing things what I could do. Like code review, API discussion, design discussion etc..
Now, the thing is I usually get upset when people go with 'lazy' solutions because I feel bad design leads to maintenance overhead, and it happened to us in past. We had to spend weekends to make things work. So, I started making code review, design review strict.
Some people didn't like it. But my manager was supportive, or at least I think so.
Some days back manager took me in a one-o-one discussion and told me one of the colleague kinda complained against me.
Now, my manager is not involving me into design discussions and API discussions. There are some new features are coming and I am not informed. I get to know things only in scrum-updates.
Am I about to get fired? I'm not gonna lie, I'm so scared. I can't put down papers as I'm already into 4th company in 7 years.
This thought is just killing me. What should I do? I'm so alone.7 -
I'm about to start as junior programmer. I'm taking a course which includes Scrum, where the teacher said '99.9 % of IT uses agile'.
That can't be right, right?!?
Or am I just being pessimistic? Can I get some estimates from the pro world, i.e. you?9 -
I know your code is great and that you learned about scrum a month ago. But I didn't know the scrum training had to say you don't assign yourself tasks, mark them as done and be surprised when other team members haven't done them, two minutes to five the day before a national holiday (yesterday).
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How does one get experience on working in teams if every project I've built has been solo because of a lack of developers from where I am from?4
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Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.
My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome. -
When i heard people talking much about scrum & agile things, but he actually never implement yet even worst he didn't really know about scrum it self, just STFO... I'm tired of all those BS 😪
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Returning to tech after 3 years working with agile, training and coaching Scrum, Kaban and XP practices. Applying for team leadership positions. Advice?1
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Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.
We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.
I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.
Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).
So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus1 -
Today, I found a bad bug. I fixed it and tried to understand what happened there. Story description was ok, dev was done on time, review performed (1/3 of the time needed to developed), testers were happy: story was DONE.
I feel uneasy as all protocols had been respected, and still, the code was bad and features were broken :( -
In the last three days our team has had 4 people who were the final decider on priority for a single project.
Im staying here until my contract has ended but then I will tell my company they can find a new project for me...1 -
I hate so much all those sprint related meetings. They literally take one day totalled (every 2 weeks).
Review, dry run demo, actual demo, planning, daily hourly meetings.... so much talking.8 -
I'm a scrum sprinter using my agile-ity to dodge rock-rigid waterfalls.
My take at another lame joke.
But I still have my legs and can walk... -
TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.
Okay my team needs some advice.
Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..
Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.
ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.
The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....
We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.
I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...
Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.
Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions... -
I think that "agile development" paradigm is really bad for programmers when it is directed by incapable people... I mean: "move fast and break things" is not a good philosophy, it is only an excuse for doing incomplete, buggy and "documentless" features that only helps the PM "visibility" (look at all the things that I did, I've been releasing 1 version per week, we have included 3 new features... we are burning 25 scrum points per capita per week)... we have to stand against this stupid way of doing things... Scrum makes that all the responsability is on us, as developers, and PMs can wash their hands freely...2
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Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".
Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!14 -
Clean code is the biggest bullshit in software development history. Oris it agile/scrum? Can’t decide yet.
Note: A new contender arrives with anti-nested coding cult. You hide your deep nested logic away from main logic block, so it is easier to maintain… Said probably by someone who never coded serious software.4 -
So let me start by saying I get so much more done when I am not in the office, so I have my top annoying co-workers
-The number one person. This person was a "developer" but I say that loosely and now she is a Agile champion / Scrum something. She is the biggest PITA constantly going around talking about how great Scrum is.
-This other developer, I actually like the guy, but he just walks over all of the time to ask me stuff. He will grab his laptop and just pop it on my desk to ask me stuff.
-I will go ahead an lump a few together, the ones that have "been doing it a long time" but don't understand the architecture of their own systems. <smh> -
Honest question, if you work in an agile environment, do you prefer story points or counting of hours to gauge tasks?4
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We all know that one guy at work that explains and overshare stuff using a lot of jargons for the sake of using jargons at the daily scrum. Then it turns out, he's ranting about something so trivial, basically wasted a lot of time. And don't get started on meetings. Oh god. Please send help.1
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I work in an agile environment and I act as scrum master. There is one team member I have been trying to get on the rails for two years now. Today she went off at standup and one other team member commented it was like listening to a diary entry. It’s true. I’ve been to agile open hours with this problem so many times- glad we are only in the office two days so I can mute myself and react. Anyone else have team members taking standup meetings hostage? I just want to scream !!!2
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When a co worker pretends to work all day by "fixing" something that you've already fixed. Just so that they have something to talk about at stand up in the morning.
Git commit -nothing 🙄 -
1 - Correct me if I’m wrong, but in true Agile, a product owner ought to be able to interact directly with the dev team, and vice versa, in the card/conversation/confirmation process of creating, estimating, and executing the user stories, correct?
2 - If Company “A” contracts with Consultant “A” to have software developed, and then Consultant “A” then contracts with Company “B” who then contracts with Consultant “B” to do the development, who would you define as the Product Owner?
3 - If Company “B” is barring Consultant “B” from talking with Company “A” and Consultant “B”, is Agile even possible?7 -
I’m having to justify why our QA team doesn’t actually point stories… anyone have a good reference?5
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The software eng. pendulum will swing away from scrum/agile nonsense after years of those things contributing mostly inferior half baked beta software to customers. Unfortunately, it will swing too far the other way but will somehow also manage to claim roots in the musings of Demming and Japanese auto manufacturing when Leave it to Beaver was still a hot TV hit. In other words, the org charts will have different titles, and different buzz words will be used, but developers will still have archetypal pointy haired bosses.
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Why do TPMs and non tech people ask for hard deadlines without knowing any technical details about how will it be implemented or how deep it is.
Then blaming you for giving wrong deadlines when it doesn't complete before the deadline for any reason whatsoever
🤯🤯🤯2 -
We are in a course for the scrum certifiaction. Most of my partners are more concerned about they can't take the decission about using scrum or not. Is so sad because os a really small organization.
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I'd like to learn SCRUM/AGILE/JIRA or whatever management thingie is available out there that helps to manage projects in a team. anybody can share any link/blog/video? thanks6
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Who still use Trello as Kanban and why don’t you change to an another (better) system?
And if you use a specific system, what is it?
My team work with Trello since the beginning. But as the team grows, it become impossible to say organize with a such simple system as Trello.3 -
When a developer refers to everyone on the team as family and you're thinking the complete & total opposite.
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!rant
Use BitBucket Cards to manage your issues as a Scrum Board. It makes your life way easier!
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