I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart.
I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)
You are describing this far more charitably than I would. I would describe it as idiocy.
For some (idiotic) reason some management types have this belief that when they measure some metric, it should fit some ideal shape when they put it on a graph, whether or not that makes any sense.
This is exactly the fallacious thinking behind stack ranking where people persistently abuse/misunderstand the whole concept of normal distribution by changing employee evaluation scores to match a normal distribution. It's like these people took a statistics class and only remembered the shapes they saw (and really only one shape) and none of the concepts underpinning those shapes.
Anyone who subscribes to this dangerously simplistic mode of thinking shouldn't have a position of leadership. Unfortunately many times everyone in leadership subscribes to the same cargo cult so they can't hold each other accountable.
Or, in other words, you follow the good old "Scotty engineering estimates" ;)
Shipping valuable features without regressions is my metric of success. Not y=mx+b applied to story points.
Burn down charts are misused far too much to be considered generally valuable.
The way he tells it, no one ever got in trouble for subpar products. But if production numbers were down, someone was going to the gulag.
Apparently, consumers were aware of this and would try to obtain goods that were produced near the start of each month.
On top of the large amount of process and the one week sprints, we also four different dev teams each working on their own microservice app which was tightly coupled to the other apps in the company. Every team had to deploy at the same time, and if one app went down, the other apps went down with it. The company's platform was essentially an ecommerce site that could have been one medium sized monolith, maintained by a single team of 5 or 6 developers, but instead we had 20+ developers, several dev managers, a scrum master, and a large QA automation team. I guess you could call it premature optimization.
There were also plenty of issues on the business side that prevented the company from truly succeeding. The place was a bit of a clusterfuck but it was an excellent learning experience.
In order to pull off this sleight of hand, real work is broken up into elastically-sized multiples of a subjective metric called "points" which the team is allowed to estimate. This estimation game is key as it builds buy-in from the team by appearing to "give them a seat at the table." Chunking the estimations into sprints is a smoke screen to keep the scam going.
Having acquired the buy-in from the people actually doing the work, the estimates are immediately converted to commitments by tracking progress on a burn down chart and telling upper management that the project will begin at 100% work remaining and proceed in a steady, linear assembly line fashion to 0% work remaining after the time allotted.
Deviations from a steady downward slope are interpreted as failures of the development team which paradoxically reinforces the standing of the chart presenter because they are able to "show the numbers". Unchecked, this ultimately elevates them to diety-like cult standing.
As the flawed assumptions underlying the chart are never questioned after the initial implementation, the use of burn down charts ultimately ends with:
- Blue Pill Ending: the company shoots itself in the foot by firing the team for failing to make the burn-down chart linear
- Seller's Market Ending: the team gets wise to the con and leaves the company
- Red Pill Ending: the process manager is fired after heroic intervention by the technical leadership
A process manager that wants to show up with their PMI certification and their burn-down charts faces a precarious end-game.
Since the shape is always different, there's virtually zero useful information to take away from it.
Some people in this thread claimed that burn down charts are useful for finding out a team's capacity. I disagree - you don't need a chart for this. If your team has a target velocity of 30 points and routinely fails to meet it, reduce the target velocity. Likewise, if the team routinely completes all of their work well before the end of the sprint, slightly increase the target velocity.
My insistence is always that what happens inside the Sprint is the concern of the development team and nobody elses.
However it's important to remember that the team itself should set their velocity in negotiation with the product owner. This shouldn't be set by some external force.
I guess the idea is that points should correlate to time (questionable), and if you're estimating perfectly, that should give you a linear burndown graph. Which is stupid. What might be less stupid is that if you want to get some idea of how well your team is estimating tasks, compared to i.e. this time last year, you could look at the volatility (across several sprints) this year compared to last year, and a lower burndown rate volatility might suggest that the team has improved at estimating the duration of tasks.
However, when you just focus on the volatility as a metric, then people start optimizing for it, which is not the point at all.
Unfortunately, what most organizations actually do is use the progress estimates to try to bludgeon developers into working faster, with entirely predictable bad effects.
It's a line chart that shows story points starting at the top left in the beginning of the sprint. Which shows all points to be done, trending towards 0 points with 0 days left in the sprint, in the lower right.
Linear means that the same points are done each day to allow the line to be perfectly linear between the top left and bottom right.
A pretty common burn down chart would have a somewhat linear slope in the beginning, a somewhat less sharp slope in the middle (mid-sprint slump), and a sharper decline to close out the sprint strong. Notice I said common (more likely to happen) and not ideal, because there truly isn't such a thing as an ideal burn down chart without context. What is ideal to one person/team may be completely different to another.
I personally track my time spent in an IDE slinging code or in app testing using an external tool to help me identify patterns. Purely in terms of time spent in IDE/app, Fridays are my least productive day by about an hour. Mondays are my second least productive. I am at my peak on Wednesdays. Thus I try to shuffle heavy loads to mid-week and the easy, gimme-task for Mon/Fri.
Just like a burn down chart, there isn't some ideal way productive time spent at work should appear on a graph. Well, I guess ideal is 100% of the day in IDE/app , but productivity would plummet. Humans just are not that efficient. Graphing my time gave me insights on how my week/month plays out. Burn down charts should do the same at a team level.
Remember the real goal: money. Sometimes it is money from sales, sometimes it is money saved. (even in case of a charity where there are higher goals money is a proxy for the real goal since it can be applied to the goal in some other way). If management can predict with reasonable accuracy when features will be done they can translate that into how much it will cost. Then they compare cost vs expected rewards (expected rewards is the job of marketing) and decide if they should focus on feature A, B, or both.
Note that many managers fail to understand error bars. There is no way to know exact numbers. However you can predict your likely error, and if the error is too high you can spend more money to reduce the error.
I recommend the book "how to measure anything" for more detail.
In the mean time when management wants perfect linear burn down charts, there is only one way to achieve them: overestimate your stories, finish them early and then go home. If you are paid for a 40 hour week you should average about 15 hours a week, but once in a while you will need to work a 40 hour week (60 hours every 10 years or so). Most management considers this unreasonable (for obvious reasons), but if a perfect linear slope actually is that important to them they will agree.
Even so with regard to work vs. time what determines the time? Launch date?
Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.
I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technology issues, and Sal Khan to represent me on education.
Government is just an organization, and an organization is a network. We should be using computer science terms to describe how we want this network to operate in terms of resolution, latency, redundancy, centralization/decentralization, upgrade protocls, failovers, and so on.
What I'm trying to say is.. Let's purge the politicians and put the people in charge.
...You just described the legislative branch. Direct democracy has its own problems; even if you scale for proportions of people, the people leading their everyday lives do not have the time to inform themselves en masse of particulars about issues, and thus would be readily swayed by false information. (As can already be seen with voting on ballot measures, which are a headache enough just being statewide)
And *viola
*voila, as the French: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/voil%C3%A0
I too, however, would prefer a run-off election.
Unless you really meant "raped", but for some reason I feel like this isn't it :^)
They trade votes on other things for concessions with Quebec. Scotland has done similar things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
It's often called RCV (Ranked Choice Voting) because that's what it was dubbed in Maine, the only US state so far to approve a plan to implement it.
It rolls the runoff(s) into one vote, and leaves the drudgery to computers (could be done by schoolchildren manually, though, or whatever).
Disruption in this vast market is difficult. Millenials and Xers will have to team up and work cooperatively. The baby boomers have gotten Democrats and Republicans to pander to them, there is no possible way those parties go away if baby boomers have any say about it.
As to why there are two parties, it's central to how the government is configured. No runoffs, range or preference voting, means that you get punished when voting for fringe candidates, because there's a very good chance the ideological opposite will win as a result of choosing a 3rd party candidate. Majoritarian democracies like the U.K. parliamentary system tend to have only two big parties, where consensual democracies like Switzerland and Germany have many parties represented in their legislatures. The U.S. is a hybrid, but the voting mechanism results in pretty much a two party system.
Do you have some examples of these types of laws?
The history of it is very interesting; essentially it was formed after the League of Women Voters, who used to run the debates, stopped running them because the system had become too corrupt: "the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter."
At a state level, election laws do things like guaranteeing the two parties a position on various ballots: city, county, state, federal. But then put in all kinds of onerous requirements for other parties just to get on the ballot. While Democrats and Republicans are using resources for other things, upstart parties have to spend money and volunteers just to get signatures in order to get on ballots and appear in debates. Primaries are tax payer funded, free publicity for established parties. Numerous laws exist for small things like elections commissions only having either Democrats or Republicans seated - i.e. if you're a third party, you can't even run for a state or county elections commission, it's prohibited. These sorts of things are very state by state or even by county.
But as I indicated in my original post, it's how U.S. elections favor the lesser of two evils strategy, else you get punished when voting for who you really want. Minor parties seldom get pluralities, and they suck away votes from an ideologically similar major party candidate which can cause them to lose, and then its the ideological opponent who wins as a result. Duverger's Law is what it's called.
For your second paragraph, do you have examples of the "onerous requirements"? Because looking at the ballotpedia list[1] I don't see anything in there that is too onerous.
And again for your final paragraph, I agree that the system supports the lesser-of-two-evils way of thinking, but that isn't something instituted by Democrats or Republicans. It's built into the system at it's most fundamental level, the Constitution.
1: https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...
[I have seen a recent push of progressive voices against gerrymandering, including both political sides (e.g. Schwarzenegger on the right and John Oliver on the left)... It is important to understand that the elimination of gerrymandering would help make the parties a little more volatile and would thereby help things get done, but it is very much a "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" measure, the polarization and 50/50 split would stay there even if you used mathematical methods to do redistricting.]
We have a fine proportional system that we use to allocate our Representatives to the States, and it is worth remembering explicitly that the House was created to solve one big problem: we have a bicameral legislature because the Founding Fathers were split between people who said "every person should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (House) and "every state should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (Senate). People from low-population states did not want city-folk running over them, and that is what the Senate guarantees.
What we need is to use this same proportional system to allocate our House Representatives to the various national Parties. The founding fathers did not want to think in terms of political parties because they were all big intelligentsia egos who figured that you'd want to really know who you were voting for. What they didn't consider is that in a fork-o-philic model, someone can basically just make their own party about their personality and they'll get one or more seats if they're influential enough. (A great example is Trump's analogue in the Netherlands, a man named Geert Wilders, who basically just made a party that was about him and his own isolationist nationalism and it has been remarkably successful as the Netherlands has similar pressures to those that got Trump elected.)
No more gerrymandering, no more 50/50 partisan split: for the House, everyone gets an equal vote for a party, and the parties get proportional representation in the House via their Webster allocation of delegates. While the party composition starts off Republican vs. Democrat, in short order the Freedom Caucus and Green Party and Libertarians and so on will have their own representation there, too. The 50/50 split in the Senate will probably still infect the House, and your parties in the House will consistently be "left-ish" and "right-ish", but the openly nonpartisan House politics will also feed back into the Senate and kill some major road-blocks.
From what I understand the party proportional system is what's used by Germany, Japan, and many other nations with modern constitutions.
We also aren't even a majoritarian democracy, often the winner has only a plurality of votes. Most voter eligible citizens don't vote (in the U.S. where it's not compulsory). We don't have range or preference voting, or run offs. All of these have consequences in the outcome.
I don't see many brawls in politics. That's maybe at dinner parties, on TV, and in forums. City council meetings are pretty boring and docile. D.C. has lots of nice friendly people (haha), which maybe superficial, but they have more manners than brawls day to day.
Possibly the one thing going on right now that left, right, hard left, hard right, center, and maybe even non-participants can agree on is a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics. Entirely out. Publicly funded elections, do the hard work yourself, with volunteers, not moneyed special interests paying for your ads and so on. It would take an amendment because money is considered speech by SCOTUS, corporations have speech rights, so they can pretty much spend whatever they want on any message for any candidate. And those interests throw red meat to activate the brawls you see. They love that. It raises money. Activates people to vote who'd otherwise stay at home.
Oh it's applicable anywhere humans interact in modelled systems. It happens in writing too - some team might be in a creative mindset and write some funny or brilliant work; a subsequent team either accurately recreates the mindset and creates a 'true spiritual successor' to the original work that can develop things like 'where that story would have gone, taken to its natural conclusion' or 're-tell it better' or so forth;
or they can simply mimic the 'formulas' or even just 'copy the original jokes' and 'miss the point'.
I might have a list of these.
> We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz
Ouch
One is that since 9/11 the airline industry has gotten far more comfortable with calling the police to remove passengers. In some cases it's totally justified. But in others airlines are jumping to the threat of police force in order to "solve" issues with customers. Basically using the stick instead of the carrot because the stick is easier and costs less money.
The second problem is a far more pervasive problem in society where people excuse the use of force on someone simply because that person didn't comply with a minor request. This is how someone who didn't want to accept a ticket for selling bootleg cigarettes ended up dead. Or the guy just this week who got pummeled by a police officer for jaywalking. "Just comply" they say. Sure, but it doesn't mean you should be beaten, bloodied, or even killed for not complying.
Basically, this wasn't just poor customer service, it was a violation of rules.
But the fact that United got to that point is the problem. They had the option to offer more money for volunteers, they even had the option to find a different flight for their employees, or maybe send them on a cab ride instead (one passenger in the video even pointed this out while it was happening). Of course, the excessive use of force is on the police and they should be the ones outside of the law on this one, I don't believe being loud in that situation warrants you get a concussion, that's just wrong.
Some people argue that "boarding" continues until the plane is in the air and that the airline can execute their right to involuntarily "denying boarding" to any passenger up to that point. Others argue that the plain meaning of the word means that once you are "aboard" the aircraft, you can no longer (legally) deny someone boarding. They argue that since the contract of carriage does not define "boarding", it must be construed to have the plain language meaning (as in the United CEO in his statement saying that "the flight was fully boarded".)
Airlines may do it all the time but, as far as I can tell, a court has never ruled on when "denying boarding" ends and "removal from aircraft" starts. Maybe now we will find out.
That's complete BS. It may be a United rule, but the law only defines how much they are required to compensate people who are denied boarding. When asking passengers to voluntarily not get on the flight, they are free to negotiate any deal that is acceptable to the two parties.
That the airline doesn't have to offer more before they execute the involuntary denial of boarding somehow has gotten twisted into the fact that they can't. That's simply not true, they just chose the cheapest way out.
However, they're missing the forest for the trees. Their processes are so bad that this type of thing actually ends up happening–which is the symptom of a marge larger loss of trust.
I fly less than I otherwise would if it was a dignified experience. Right now smart VCs are thinking about how to reinvent airlines and let's hope they get in soon.
Problem with the airline industry is that its about as far from free market as you can get. The routes are set by the DOT and auctioned and traded among airlines like football players on an NFL team. And just like the NFL its almost impossible to bring a new team in because of the rules and the massive capital it would take. AFAIK there are a few options for companies that want to operate outside of the normal airport and commercial airline structure, but they are very limited.
I pity Munoz because culture can be hard to shift that people no longer recognize that their business revolves around service, and employees with poor people skills get promoted because they achieve their KPIs by acting against common sense.
Whether or not bumping him is fair, there is no question about who owns the aircraft and has responsibility/authority. No one would want to fly on an airline where a stubborn passenger could override the flight crew.
People seem to think that flight crew somehow have been ordained with god-given authority to suspend the rule of law aboard an aircraft. That is simply not true. People are legally required to obey safety-related crew instructions and placards.
The idea that if the flight crew instructs you to strip naked you are somehow required to obey and if you do not they have a right to eject you from the airplane is frankly ridiculous.
But it doesn't even matter, because the airplane was not in flight, 14 CFR Part 121 does not apply, and the people acting in question were gate personnel, not flight crew.
I'm not aware of any situation where you can legally be involuntarily strip-searched without being arrested. Maybe by customs but I'm not sure.
Personally, if the flight crew instructed me to strip naked or leave the plane, I would just leave. I can't foresee any situation where I would physically fight the staff for my seat, or recommend anyone else to do so.
I know Americans are a bit high-strung when it comes to "property rights", but here's one example: It may be your property all you want but you can't call the police to kick your tenants out because you decided you don't want them there any longer. IF there has been a contract violation, you can go to court and eventually get an enforceable court order, but if you call the police and tell them to kick your tenants out because you just changed your mind about renting it to them, they're more likely to laugh in your face.
That is what the police should have done in this case. Once they ascertained that the passenger ticketed in his seat and was not a safety issue, they should have said "sorry, this is a contract dispute. You can take him to court."
Edit: Note that after kicking him out he was not arrested and has not been charged with any crime that I've heard of.
I think both of us have a very strong sense of property rights, only we disagree who to ascribe them to. I think it belongs to the airline, so if the man wants to create a dispute with the airline, he should be the one to take it to court (and he probably will.) From my POV, you are saying the man has property rights over the seat because he had a ticket for it and had his arse is in it.
We are not talking about a random piece of property being trespassed upon here. We are talking specifically about a situation where the airline is licensed to take money from the public in exchange for letting people put their "arses" in those seats.
I won't. I had to save me at least $100 before I'll choose United. Which has nothing to do with this case. I just really don't like United due to previous experiences.
This problem is pretty much every company I've ever worked for if/when they got over six engineers. I spend more time and a hell of a lot more energy than I should trying to keep managers or easily enthused engineers from hugging the project to death.
I ended up becoming a process expert out of a sense of self preservation. I use process a lot, but it's always in support of the 'why's. I don't always talk about the 5 Whys but it's always there, and in my experience the people who are usually the problem can't ever manage more than three.
The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window.
That's an amazing quote. I'm totally stealing this.
If you don't try to steer the conversation toward reversible decisions AND avoid trivialities then you spend your problem solving budget on actively harmful plans.
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content."
Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlines suffer from.