Re:The State of Agile Software in 2018
by lmm on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:50AM
(#18299675)
> Many important tasks take concentrated effort over many days or weeks.
This is commonly claimed, but I've never seen an example (in software) that stood up to scrutiny. People can always find a way to deliver some useful, visible value within two weeks of one person's work if they spend 5 minutes actually trying to think of a way to do it.
> Its pointless to go to standup and say "I've a problem with logging in the presence of disk errors, where the driver interacts with the log buffering by generating more log messages". Nobody going to offer useful help without actually recapitulating the work you've already done. So what's the point?
If you're making progress on your task and just need to spend some more time, it's fine to just say as much. If you've been stuck for a while, maybe it is time to ask someone else to come work on the problem with you - or at least time to warn the end client that what you're doing is going to be late. Taking a few minutes once a day to look back and decide whether you're actually making any progress or need to stop and reassess is about the right cadence, rather than blindly bashing your head against the problem for weeks or months.
(Sometimes bashing your head against the problem for weeks or months is the right thing, but it should be an explicit, conscious decision to do that)
And the flipside is that it gives people who need input from you a scheduled point to ask for it, rather than interrupting your work. Presumably you're working on the same product with these people and so what you do affects each other - otherwise why are you in the same standup or even the same team?
This is commonly claimed, but I've never seen an example (in software) that stood up to scrutiny. People can always find a way to deliver some useful, visible value within two weeks of one person's work if they spend 5 minutes actually trying to think of a way to do it.
> Its pointless to go to standup and say "I've a problem with logging in the presence of disk errors, where the driver interacts with the log buffering by generating more log messages". Nobody going to offer useful help without actually recapitulating the work you've already done. So what's the point?
If you're making progress on your task and just need to spend some more time, it's fine to just say as much. If you've been stuck for a while, maybe it is time to ask someone else to come work on the problem with you - or at least time to warn the end client that what you're doing is going to be late. Taking a few minutes once a day to look back and decide whether you're actually making any progress or need to stop and reassess is about the right cadence, rather than blindly bashing your head against the problem for weeks or months.
(Sometimes bashing your head against the problem for weeks or months is the right thing, but it should be an explicit, conscious decision to do that)
And the flipside is that it gives people who need input from you a scheduled point to ask for it, rather than interrupting your work. Presumably you're working on the same product with these people and so what you do affects each other - otherwise why are you in the same standup or even the same team?