Comment by jacobyoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobyoder | Hacker News Reader

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My overarching experience with 'agile story points' (paraphrased combination between multiple teams/projects).

"If it's not a 3, then it might be a 5. But if it's not a 5, that would mean it's an 8, and we can't have 8s. 8s are too much. You have to break it down more".

"What is 'too much'?"

"That's too many days of work".

"But I thought points weren't an estimate of time/hours/days, just a level of effort or complexity.".

"8s are too big"

"But... 8 is the best notion at this point. It's a complex problem. Maybe after working through the ticket, a natural break point will present itself and we can chunk it and make a second ticket with follow on work later. But right now, I can't see any split point".

"Well... you have to break it down first. Make this in to multiple tickets. The sprint starts tomorrow and we can't have 8s".

I experienced similar at a previous company. Everything was a 1, 2, or 3. If it was a 5, the "scrum master" got a frowny-face. "Guys, can we break this down more??" Then a 15 minute discussion would ensue. That was literally the person's only contribution.

(If you suggested an 8, they'd look at you crazy and it would get back logged.)

The entire engineering org was measured on velocity. Every 2 weeks, at end of sprint, there would be a huge Slack posting with various stats for something like 6 or 7 teams. "85% completion! 5% are still in review. 10% of tasks were not even started!!"

Some managers would game the system. If a task wasn't done, they'd just mark it complete and open a ticket to finish it up next sprint (typically "integration testing for feature X" or "QA feature X".) One guy must've dragged his original 3 point ticket out for 4 sprints doing this. The "velocity" was meaningless.

> "You have to break it down more"

"How much time do I have to do the analysis to break it down?"

"None"

And every ticket is complex, and the PM is annoyed that every ticket is being faithfully marked as such. But they balk at taking the time to try to plan out that high level goal to enough extend that we can break the ticket apart into smaller pieces that make sense, or just make it an epic because it is one and add tickets to it as we figure out how we're going to implement $todays_insanity_from_higher_up…

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