Re:Scrum disempowers developers
by specialist on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @10:59AM
(#17188178)
I have thought about it. A lot.
I'm told I work too slow, dive too deep. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do just 80%, "good enough".
When I was a kid, I published shareware. After getting a few 3:00am wake up calls from irate customers, I said "never again". I spent 15 years designing, engineering away technical support calls. It mostly worked. Later on... When my team(s) burned a CD, we rarely had to issue patches, hot fixes.
Customers loved us.
I thought that was the pinnacle of human achievement.
Now, I feel like I'm still fighting battles over things no one cares about any more.
Customers may talk about hating bugs, but when you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, 95% of the time they'll buy buggier software with more features.
Re:Scrum disempowers developers
by bradstewart on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @11:54AM
(#17188751)
This. Figuring out how to stop at 80% is a skill I'm struggling to learn. And I don't mean "learn to half-ass things"; in the vast majority of cases 80% is more than good enough to get the job done.
Have you ever thought much about why, though? When I was young, I was super optimistic - and I got burned by all of the surprises (including the underspecified or unstated requirements), so I started to estimate pessimistically based on experience. But then I got stuck in this loop: "How long will this take?" "Probably two weeks" "What? Why two weeks? Why not two days? We only have two days. Say it will only take two days, or tell me everything you're going to be doing on an hour-by-hour basis to justify this high estimate!" So now I've just gotten really good at figuring out how long they want me to say it will take, say it will take that long, and shrug my shoulders when it takes longer. Since everybody else is doing the same thing (as they don't have any choice), it doesn't surprise anybody.