Re:Hard deadlines are not user-first
by galangalalgol on Thursday January 02, 2020 @10:35AM
(#21936204)
I agree with your disagree. Work at a sustainable pace and if all your stories are slipping to the next sprint every time then you know you are underestimating. Likewise if you never slip you are overestimating. Forcing people to always finish each sprint will either burn out your team or cause estimates to be far too conservative leading to slower progress. That said, there are actual dead lines, where if you are late the software is useless and you are going to be returning a customer's money, or at best losing a customer's confidence. Those deadlines don't happen every two weeks.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
If you are selling through sales people, and have enough new customers, then it’s possible to have a situation with a deadline every few weeks, unless someone intentionally brings sanity into this process.
Re:Hard deadlines are not user-first
by galangalalgol on Thursday January 02, 2020 @06:02PM
(#21940908)
Yes, sales getting ahead of production has caused a lot of burnout. Growing production teams as fast as sales can grow is hard.
The only time I've come close is when we fostered a culture of continuous improvement. We don't want to just produce features faster. If that's all you ask for you get people finding new and better ways to cut corners.
Learning productivity tricks and building tools actually lets you do the same amount of work in less time. Some quality initiatives reduce rework, which also increases throughput. And these practices also reduce stress during exceptional events (production issues). That effect may be mostly obvious but what we don't ever talk about is the fallout of stressful events and how they affect the quality of the code produced immediately afterward.
Burnout, as you say, is the end game of not doing this. But I think the symptoms are detectable long before that point (and I might argue are part of the feedback loop that leads to burnout).