Agile, again....

[Big Blue Plymouth]

Ok, so at the end of my second week here and so far I have spent 13 hours in meetings.

Yesterday I attended something called an iteration "grooming" session in which we were invited to hold up cards indicating how complex we think a user story is by allocating a T Shirt size to it (?!). We didn't get it all done (after 4 hours) & I have to go back in to finish off at 9 am.

I really feel like pointing out (though I'm biting my tongue for now) what a complete and utter waste of friggin' time these meetings are. They think they get more accurate estimates by insisting all devs attend but where I've done agile before, only a scrum lead would attend meetings at this level & the devs would only have input at the task level in the sprint planning. Even that was split between Devs and testers to minimise the length of the meetings.

What says it all is how much time we allocate each day to actual hands on dev work: 5.5 hours. The rest is there to take up the slack from all the meetings we have to go for.

Why should I complain? Really, I had more fun having my wisdom teeth taken out....

[WTFH]

5.5 hours per day working, yet billing for a full day? The place you want to get to is where you can work from home during these meetings. You can get a lot more done.
Your other option which we did at a client a few years ago was that each week half the team would delegate the other half to attend certain meetings. The meeting was a tick box exercise for the ClientCo so as long as you turned up at one or two a month they didn't mind.

[_V_]

Sounds like a laugh, why is playing cards in meetings not fun? It's not work and yet you get paid for the full day.

In my role I just get left sat at a computer 8 hours a day with no one to talk to.

[Cirrus]

Ok, so at the end of my second week here and so far I have spent 13 hours in meetings.

It's such a shame.

If you look at the agile manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

What this clearly is, is not a brave new idea; it's a rejection of waterfall and bureaucratic IT departments (the items on the right).

Human beings (read: less wise than us) can't let go of an obsession to predict the future. Agile is about not trying to spend ages coming with predictions (specs, requirements, plans, budgets) but instead get on with things , and react as you discover the lie of the land.

But no: man-days pop right back up as T-shirts; progress becomes velocity; emails become post-it notes on brown paper.

I have just come from a client that was quite agile but introduced proper agile (ie full blown Scrum with all the attendant religious ceremonies eg BDD). Apart from tons of consultants, they were making OK progress (no more) but the team was about 50 for maybe 5 people actually cutting code, and it was sucking in £millions per annum whereas my projects were more like £200k.

But the extremism was what got me. I casually said to my boss (who was mainly smack in the middle of this agile circus) that one of my projects is essentially agile (the spec was being changed every day as programmers and everybody else discovered the realities of what they were doing). He nearly exploded.

It was if I had insulted Allah.

Hopeless...

[Big Blue Plymouth]

5.5 hours per day working, yet billing for a full day? .

I actually like the work bit. The other 2 hours is sheer, unmitigated misery.

I feel like I'm on a fairground ride I can't get off....

[LondonManc]

With waterfall planning, when I've been PM for projects, I want the people who will be doing the tasks to commit to a deadline for them. I therefore ask them to give me the duration. This does two things; it gives me more accurate estimates from the people who will know more about the task than I would and it gets them bought in to the project because they already feel engaged and involved.

I'm not sure how this process is any different other than it's for generation snowflake?

[Willapp]

Yeah, agile

This is my first time working at a very large company. They throw around "agile" as a mantra but in reality it's some kind of hybrid waterfall as we're always working to fixed deadlines. We have as many BA/Solution Architects as we do developers, and most of them cause more problems than they solve.

Luckily they're all decent people and the rate is fantastic so it's a small price to pay.

[VectraMan]

First rule of Agile should be "no meetings". Or at least no formal meetings where everybody trapses into a meeting room and is bored to tears for hours on end.

I worked for a company that had embraced SCRUM, but we seemed to do more meetings than ever. It didn't help that the first half of every meeting was taken up by everybody arguing about what SCRUM was and why we were having a meeting.

[SueEllen]

With waterfall planning, when I've been PM for projects, I want the people who will be doing the tasks to commit to a deadline for them. I therefore ask them to give me the duration. This does two things; it gives me more accurate estimates from the people who will know more about the task than I would and it gets them bought in to the project because they already feel engaged and involved.

I'm not sure how this process is any different other than it's for generation snowflake?

The entire point of agile is that you don't spend hours in meetings. If the meetings are taking a lot of time then the process is being done wrong.

[LondonManc]

The entire point of agile is that you don't spend hours in meetings. If the meetings are taking a lot of time then the process is being done wrong.

I thought that was just the entire point of not working for Accenture?