I’m glad my company speaks a different language than English, and can’t use all the word soup completely. That said, my company is also wondering why my timesheets never add up to the entire day because always in meetings, scrum, or “can we jump on video chat for a sec because it’s easier to explain vocally than in writing”… And that “sec” turns into a 30 minute tutorial I have to give.
Take a shot anytime the non technical scrum master/product owner wants to “help” by trying to get someone else involved the moment you mention any kind of detail/problem/thing you’re working on
Sprints aren’t for you, it’s for the higher ups to have a digestible view of what’s going on in the team by presenting work done over 2-3 weeks, calibrating budgets, etc.
As a dev, yeah, sprints feel restrictive and artificial as fuck lol
If you still do the sizing (it’s not entirely wasted as it’s a reasonably effective tool to gauge understanding across the team), This can still be done without the artificial time boxing.
“How much work have we done in the last two weeks?” Just look at all the stories closed in the last two weeks. Easy.
“When will X be delivered?” Look at X and all its dependencies, add up all the points, and guesstimate the time equivalence.
Kanban isn’t a free for all, you still need structure and some planning. But you take most of that away from the do-ers and let them do what they do best… do.
I prefer V-cycle for when you have a software with known specs & Kanban for when you don’t really know what the client needs/wants. I mean those magic clients you hear about but never sees…
If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.
AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.
“AI” is great for first drafts/seeing a different wording, and automating very tedious crap. For instance, I really like taking proposals I write, dropping them into ChatGPT and saying “write me a 200 word executive summary,” then taking whatever it spits out to start making my own.
“Co-pilot” is a great way of thinking about it. I have no idea if that actual product is any good, but I know when I started thinking of AI tools as kind of a copilot of sorts, it made a lot more sense to me. It illustrates the limitations as well. Though I’d say more it’s more accurately “assistant to the pilot.” If you take me out of the seat, it can’t drive the vehicle and everyone will be upset with the results
Too many companies are falling for the loudest marketing in the room when it comes to AI. They see a shiny, perfectly curated demo and go “huh that seems neat we should do it” regardless of its relevance. They’re looking for shiny features and add-ons. What they should be thinking about is the very tedious, particularly manual tasks that eat up an inordinate amount of their time on a weekly basis. The AI solutions they should be looking for are ones that reduced or eliminate those tasks.
AI can be very useful at saving time. Too many people are using it as a solution in search of a problem. I think the best application for AI involve our day-to-day work, not consumer facing solutions.
making them better would mean more work, stress and ill conceived requirements for the programmers. I’m more in favor of marketing thrashing about on their own.
Which is fine with me tbh because fuck sales. I’d never survive independently, because I’d tell the customer the truth. And the truth doesn’t sell. I don’t have the energy to lie about how everything is better than it actually is.
In our head nothing ever was wrong, bugs only came along when you came along! You should have been able to build it in days, what’s so hard about this?
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