Re:Scrum disempowers developers
by wpietri on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @10:24PM
(#17193503)
That's great to hear, and I'm sorry it blew up.
I had a less extreme version that still served our needs. My rule was that a fixed percentage of effort, say 80%, would go to business priorities. The product manager could certainly ask about where the time was going, but they couldn't claim it unilaterally. The rest of it could be ordered and reordered as the product manager thought best. We in turn could ask about that.
This worked well for us, in that it let us keep the code clean and make tooling improvements without having to explain to a non-developer what was going on.
It was also helpful that we were good at expressing technical-sounding things in user terms. E.g., all scaling and reliability work was put into the backlog with titles like, "system handles 1000 simultaneous users" or "system survives web server failure". And a lot of research was covered by the product manager buying information rather than features.
Of course, this was at a startup, where there was no "on high". The product manager was the CEO, so in theory he could have fired us, but mainly we just collaborated on getting shit done.
I had a less extreme version that still served our needs. My rule was that a fixed percentage of effort, say 80%, would go to business priorities. The product manager could certainly ask about where the time was going, but they couldn't claim it unilaterally. The rest of it could be ordered and reordered as the product manager thought best. We in turn could ask about that.
This worked well for us, in that it let us keep the code clean and make tooling improvements without having to explain to a non-developer what was going on.
It was also helpful that we were good at expressing technical-sounding things in user terms. E.g., all scaling and reliability work was put into the backlog with titles like, "system handles 1000 simultaneous users" or "system survives web server failure". And a lot of research was covered by the product manager buying information rather than features.
Of course, this was at a startup, where there was no "on high". The product manager was the CEO, so in theory he could have fired us, but mainly we just collaborated on getting shit done.