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Re:Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of pr... by ProfMeowsworth on Friday December 24, 2021 @07:11PM (#29679045)
Came here to say that. The author spends a lot of effort to basically describe working in sprints.
Re:Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of pr... by throwaway984393 on Friday December 24, 2021 @08:00PM (#29679308)
It's very similar to Scrum, with some nuanced differences. He mentions "do not work on incremental changes" and "do not focus on user stories", and instead "do construct small goals that achieve more general yet still concrete outcomes", and "do prioritize those goals".

I think his advice suffers from the same problem Scrum does, which is that it's simultaneously too generic and too constricting for anyone to perform it correctly and get good value out of it unless they just happen to be really excellent at their jobs or have a great team leader.

Re:Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of pr... by civilized on Friday December 24, 2021 @08:06PM (#29679336)
Seems like this field is very preoccupied with attempts to distill excellence into a formula. But the skill you need to do this approach well is "identifying doable tasks that make meaningful progress towards the overall goal", which basically just the entire skill of project management.
Re:Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of pr... by jadeforrest on Saturday December 25, 2021 @09:23PM (#29689097)
Hi, I'm the author. I'm not intending to describe working in sprints. You can implement the ideas behind this article with sprints, kanban, or something else entirely. Using sprints doesn't do what using milestones does.

So what I'm hearing is that that wasn't clear. Since a few people said that here, I'll make some edits to clarify. If you have any suggestions as to where the confusion is, I'd love to hear it. Thank you!

Re:Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of pr... by roenxi on Friday December 24, 2021 @10:14PM (#29680033)
"Sprint" is a label. Someone needs to put a lot o effort into describing what a sprint actually is, or people will use the label on things that are not sprints.