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Can you please activate your webcams?
Please choose a sticky note color to use for this meeting
Please take one of these smiley stickers and tell the others how you feel now
I like some of the concepts of agile and scrum. Two week sprints rather than multi-year projects. Faster turn around on bugs. Having a prioritized backlog so we know what we are doing next. Small standups to get ahead of blockers. Spending less time documenting everything and more time developing. You don’t need a PM or scrum master in those things. A good team lead can do it. If the PM needs an update, they can look at the board.
A lot of the crap that gets add in to it is so freaking useless. There is an AVP at my company that keeps pushing everyone to sign and share team agreements so “there can accountability.” It’s so cringy. If someone is getting stuff done, do you really think having them sign something saying they will do it is going to help? If someone is getting stuff done, then it isn’t going to change anything. It’s infantalizing. So much of it is micromanagement and lack of team trust.
The last place i worked at they started pushing the same type of cringe. What made it worse was the PM/BA wasnt actually writing stories. One sprint I had 4 stories with just titles and “TBD” on the description. His boss was mad that my productivity was low when i couldnt do the work they couldn’t describe.
Good job not doing a murder! I don’t know if I could keep my cool at whomever allowed “TBD” to get into an active sprint.
How can you provide acceptable results if there is no acceptance criteria defined? Was “literally reads minds” on your job posting?!
The problem was that my boss was a title hopper and needed to fill his old position and he did it with yes men who wouldn’t stand up for anything. Meant that these yes men were also not the greatest at doing the rest of the job either.
They were expecting me to just do Hero Engineering by not objecting, put in more time and fill on the gap when theu couldn’t do their job. Was the first time in 20 years i ever was reprimanded, been praised at everything else I’ve done. So i knew at that point this was just a toxic place to work.
Sounds infuriating as hell. Props for your use of the past tense :D
I will admit that I have done that. I have created tasks, typically bugs, that have a title, maybe a screenshot, and a note that says contact me. It’s typically when I notice something wrong and can’t figure out an easy way to word it. Part of the problem is that I’m a visual person, so I like to show what I’m seeing. I don’t like doing it becuase I know people like to have details up front. It is something I’m working on. However, I would not hold my lack of communication against one of my devs.
We aren’t talking about a bug, new feature stories. No screen shots, no identifieres to get me closer to a solution.
For example one of my stories had the following as the total amount of text for the entire ticket: “Add parser for new message type.”
Add the parser where? What is the new message type? Is this for a test tool or the project itself? Unit test framework? In a library or in the project code? We were working on two protocols and one protocol had a high level and low level message structure so i literally had 3 possibilities.
And when i asked my boss what the ticket was about i was told that i should do some investigation and fill in the ticket myself. Wtf?!? When i then told my productivity was wanting i started looking for a new job.
Yeah, I’ve also found that having a great team lead and manager has been better than relying on a dedicated SCRUM master. (Beacuse my favorite SCRUM masters always take a promotion within a year.)
I do require my team to commit to and help me occasionally update a shared values document. I hate teams that don’t have one. Teams have so many unspoken agreements that are genuinely easy to just write down.
That said, I say screw “accountability”. I have the biggest paycheck on the team, so I can afford to keep the accountability to myself. My team has my back because I find them good pay and reasonable hours, not because of our of values document.