News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Should I fire an engineer for working on his side projects during office hours?. Parent comment

Re:Should I fire an engineer for working on his side project... by JustSomeNobody on Friday April 28, 2017 @08:54AM (#14218964)
I think it odd that some companies that say they practice Agile/Scrum still track hours. If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work, it doesn't matter if they put in 60 hours or 16 hours doing it.

Of course, there's meetings and fires, and so the dev should be available for that, but, in all, who cares about the number of hours?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Should I fire an engineer for working on his side project... by zzalpha on Friday April 28, 2017 @09:30AM (#14219178)
If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work,

If you're committed to Agile, I don't understand why you're talking about individual commitments at all.

The team commits to sprint scope. The team succeeds or fails in meeting that commitment as a group.

Beyond that the team should be free to figure out how the commitment is met.

We have one team that works 10:30 to 6:30. Another that works more traditional 9-5 hours. One is largely remote. Another is co-located. They all produce high quality work at a solid, and most importantly consistent, rate.

If we tried to force some work pattern on them, I doubt they'd be as successful.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Should I fire an engineer for working on his side project... by bitexploder on Friday April 28, 2017 @09:58AM (#14219388)
Hours let you develop much better estimation models. Agile/Scrum isn't a silver bullet and it is valuable information for any development shop.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Should I fire an engineer for working on his side project... by doublescoop on Friday April 28, 2017 @03:24PM (#14222306)
> certain amount of work

This is the crux. How does the business decide what's a reasonable amount of work to get done in a sprint? If the dev in the OP has time to work on his own stuff, why shouldn't the business ask for a bigger commitment in the next sprint?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Should I fire an engineer for working on his side project... by JustSomeNobody on Friday April 28, 2017 @05:19PM (#14223147)
They can; that's why they track a team's velocity.
[ Parent | on HN ]