Re:How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
by dotancohen on Thursday November 04, 2021 @04:54AM
(#29104796)
> Do you have any articles, case studies, etc of how to express this to management that is
> generally oblivious to the day-to-day, in-the-trenches, experiences and pain points of developers?
It is the "generally oblivious" that is the problem. Log holdups whenever a ticket takes significantly longer than the estimate. And be specific as to what the holdup was. > What you're saying sounds great to me, who is a developer, but how would you come up with halfway realistic numbers for Y and X?
The same way that I come up with halfway realistic numbers for any other dev work. I pull it out of my donkey. Then double it. > The best thing I could think to do is have the team minutely log all lost minutes productivity
> caused by delays and inefficiencies that the proposed fixes could address.
Yes, log it! It does not have to be by the minute. Honestly, if the holdups are only causing minutes of delays, then they're not so bad unless your ticket take only minutes to complete anyway. My general rule is to log any holdup of more than half an hour, or more than 10% of the time estimated to develop a feature/bugfix. Very loosely, of course.
(I chose 10% because we had 30 developers at the time and generally had teams of 3 developers. So, one dedicated DX team...)
Do you have any articles, case studies, etc of how to express this to management that is generally oblivious to the day-to-day, in-the-trenches, experiences and pain points of developers?
What you're saying sounds great to me, who is a developer, but how would you come up with halfway realistic numbers for Y and X?
The best thing I could think to do is have the team minutely log all lost minutes productivity caused by delays and inefficiencies that the proposed fixes could address.
But even that's tricky. For example, at one of my previous positions, the build pipeline could take hours and could randomly fail.
The only way to maintain any semblance of productivity would be to juggle 3-4 tickets at once. This was incredibly challenging, and productivity took a massive hit due to the frustration and context switching.
However, even if I had logged those experiences down to the minute, there weren't any literal downtime minutes. It was more a matter of juggling five tickets at once that should have taken one hour each, but instead they took five hours each because I was context switching faster than the Linux kernel itself.
This sounds good to me, a developer but again, I'm not sure how to express this to management. It's not like "one feature" is some standard unit of measurement - the time to shipping "one feature" varies by orders of magnitude.Scrum and its much-maligned "story points" are a possible solution here, as far as management is concerned, assuming both developers and management have bought into that concept and are using it correctly.