The continued failure to make it through a successful sprint (even I had a whopping single hour of work left after the last day) has resulted in a three-week grace period during which we are expected to wrap up work on the last sprint while meeting to do research and design work for the upcoming four-week fiasco. Like everything we do, three weeks ( Read more... )

Holy fuck, two three and half hours of meetings today devoted to discussing what the fuck we are going to do to fix the Scrum process rather than, well, actually practicing the Scrum process. I worked on my assigned features for all of an hour today (surfed LiveJournal for all of twenty minutes), so basically, day two and I'm somehow seven hours ( Read more... )

Well, our project manager just officially added my entire month's worth of daily Scrum meetings to my calendar. I lucked out and snagged 10:30 a.m. for my particular feature. In light of the highly granular tracking of my time, however, I will nevertheless endeavor to arrive at work before 10 a.m each morning ( Read more... )

So, my fucking junior manager added eight more hours of tasks to my list, then in today's follow-up meeting we decided to drop a major feature requirement, in the process removing twenty-eight hours from my collaborator's workload. The end result is that, on a feature (or "epic") with which I am merely "assisting," I have a hundred hours while the ( Read more... )

By the end of today's five-hour Sprint Planning Meeting, I had signed up for 96 hours of work over the course of the next month. Four weeks times five days times eight hours is a total of 160 man-hours that I should have available (assuming no meetings or holidays); so that's basically 64 hours total or 3.2 hours per day during which I am free to ( Read more... )

After a ninety minute team meeting digging into the details of our new software development process, I raised my hand and said:

"I'd just like to take exception with the mixing of metaphors that is going on here. We are running sprints in pursuit of epics and storylines that we measure with t-shirt sizes while tracking our entire progress on a ( Read more... )