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Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

How did he see into the future to know which work he'd be doing on the next sprint, and how did he also finish the current sprint's work with a bullseye thus allowing the next sprint's to begin and match it?

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From my reading, it's really quite brilliant. He just says that he's about to start the tasks that, in reality, he's just finishing up. Then he delays reporting that the task is done. His estimates are then always made with perfect hindsight.

This only works though, if one is working in isolation and no one else checks out the work before the time one commits to the work. That would mean being some lone expert in that part of the product, which is not a good sign for the business, because bus factors of 1.

That's the neat part of agile / scrum / whatever at larger companies, they don't actually change priorities much from one sprint to the next unless there's a major external factor like an outage. Larger companies like to be able to look ahead, at least a quarter but ideally a year or more.

At my current contract we use "SAFe", "scaled agile framework" which basically revolves around quarterly plannings, but above that is a long term planning of course. (energy industry, scale of hundreds of engineers)

Not the op, but you only commit to what you already did in this sprint.

So this sprint shows what you delivered 2 sprints ago, next sprint will be the work you just finished.

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