[EngineerBetter]

If you're getting burnout doing agile, you're doing agile wrong.

Don't do sprints. Have a continuous backlog. Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates. Always do the simplest thing. Only ever do the most important thing, as defined by the stakeholder.

I've written and talked about this at great length. The fact people suggest agile gives you burnout reinforces my experience that Scrum is largely misinterpreted and people incorrectly focus on sprint commitments. If Scrum is so commonly misinterpreted, it is flawed.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scrum-makes-you-dumb-daniel-j...

https://youtu.be/k9duArRuSjQ

[Scarblac]

The business wants to know how much feature X is going to cost and when they can expect it.

They need to know that, because they need to decide if it's worth it in the first place, or because they need to plan follow-up actions for when the feature will be done.

If the developer doesn't make estimates, you're just forcing other people to make their own estimates, that they'll hold you to.

[BurningFrog]

> The business wants to know how much feature X is going to cost and when they can expect it.

Of course they do. We all want things that are impossible to have. I want to know the AAPL stock price in 6 months.

The traditional way to manage this impossibility is that engineering lies about it (they have to lie, because they can't know either), and once people are lying to each other, trust is unlikely to arise.

The agile concept of "velocity" is the best way I know of managing this. It's not very good, and it's often a victim of Goodhart's law.

[beat]

Another bit of wisdom I got from Kent Beck is that there are three basic controls to every project... schedule, scope, and resources. You can only control two of them. And resources are generally fixed at the beginning of the project(1), so most projects are either scope-bound (we must have all these features), or schedule-bound (we must hit this hard date). If you're feature-bound, estimation failure means you'll be late. If you're schedule-bound, estimation failure means you'll be incomplete.

This can be a very hard pill for the business to swallow. They want it all, and they want a predictable schedule. But Beck's triangle is akin to thermodynamics. Do you want the volume, or the pressure, or the temperature? When fixing devops-related and agile-related process problems, I often hear "But we're a schedule-driven company!" when they have a scope-driven problem like process transformation.

1. As The Mythical Man-Month pointed out almost 50 years ago, adding resources to a late project makes it even later.

[gregmac]

> They need to know that, because they need to decide if it's worth it in the first place

If this is the case, they should also be able to state the threshold above which the item would be "not worth it", and I would assume this is significantly easier to figure out than it takes developers to build a decent estimate.

From a developer point-of-view, the first high-level estimate is then much, much simpler: "Is it going to take more or less than $not_worth_it to build?"

If the answer is "more", then it gets dropped -- at least in its current state. It could be re-scoped later as a new item with a smaller MVP, for example.

If the answer is "less", then the developer can put in the time to get a proper estimate. I think there might also be an argument that if the backlog is properly ranked the detailed estimate also becomes pointless -- just work on it until it's done. No one should be doing detailed estimates on items that are more than a few weeks/sprints away in the first place.

Disclaimer: I've only recently been thinking about this abstractly, and have not yet tested this in practice, though I'd love to have this discussion with anyone that has.

[RandallBrown]

Nobody should make estimates. They're always wrong.

Do your best to break tasks up so that all tasks are the same size. Then work on tasks. You'll find a stable average of tasks per amount of time and that will let you forecast how long things will take, how much they'll cost, etc.

That's how you figure out when things will be done.

[tybit]

I think this is totally reasonable at certain times. E.g how long will it take to add feature x with scope y to our existing product is a decent thing to estimate (and estimate only) for stakeholders to prioritise appropriately.

I think most problems people have with estimates is when they are applied to things too large, or too small, to reasonably estimate. E.g How long will it take to build this product from scratch with a laundry list of features. Or more commonly, to micromanage. Why does anyone care whether this task will take 2 days as opposed to 3? That’s not meanginful information unless you’re mistakently expecting the individual user story estimates to add up to a reliable assembly line of work.

I’m happy to estimate when it has some business purpose. If not, it’s meaningless busy work or worse.

[watwut]

Theoretically. Practicaly they don't do that kind of planning and high estimate leads to pressure to lower it down (or making you feel ashamed for it being to big etc), which most developers will do, because developers tend to sux at negotiation.

[ramraj07]

Only issue being that the estimates one gets from poorly planned sprints are probably less reliable than just asking the devs how long the project will take and going with it.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> They need to know that, because they need to decide if it's worth it in the first place

Thats only if that feature is optional. Often it isn't, and then it is pointless to estimate. Absolutely pointless.

[noxToken]

>Don't do sprints. Have a continuous backlog. Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates. Always do the simplest thing. Only ever do the most important thing, as defined by the stakeholder.

The problem with this is that the stakeholder might not understand what simple means. It happens here all the time.

We get "simple" requests for verbiage changes, but after reviewing the story, the verbiage request isn't universal. It only applies to certain offerings, and the stakeholders only want the verbiage the be applied after a certain step in the application. This is still a relatively simple change, but when factoring in all the other "simple" requests that involve complex logic, changing displayed text becomes relatively complex.

We do sprints because it's our time box to see how close we are to hitting the mark. A sprint isn't a hard deadline in which the team must kill themselves to get everything finished. It's an arbitrary passage of time for setting goal to keep on track with what is going to be released. If you have something that's releasing two months into the future, it's easy to say that you can still make time although your first two weeks were riddled with unexpected complications and stoppages. A sprint forces us to focus on what should have already been completed to re-prioritize if necessary. And you can't feasibly do that without an estimation.

The two biggest problems with estimations are underestimating and treating estimations as promises. It's hard to estimate. So the best course of action is to make stories as small as possible. Probably smaller than someone would consider rational. If not, at least have the stories divided into individual tasks or chunks. Then once you have estimations, treat them as goals rather than deadlines. Use your sprint review as a time to honestly reflect on why the estimation was missed. Then, and this is critical to successfully estimating in the future, use the notes of reflection to make better estimates.

[joncp]

> The problem with this is that the stakeholder might not understand what simple means. It happens here all the time.

"Do the simplest thing" means don't overengineer, not necessarily that the feature won't be complex. You only code up what helps fulfill that particular story's definition of "done."

As for complex features. when my stakeholder asks for some big complex change it's almost always decomposable into much simpler stories. Maybe those have to be hidden behind feature flags until the whole epic is done, but they're shippable individually. Doing that decomposition up front helps demonstrate the complexity to the stakeholder and takes some pressure off of me. It also makes them feel secure because they have more granular insight into progress; that they're not sending me off on some Lewis & Clark expedition.

[tootie]

The number one reason agile projects fail in my experience has absolutely nothing to do with planning session, sprint cadence or estimation. It's because the client was not properly prepared to accept iterative delivery or play their part as product owner. I see a lot of team organize themselves around a well-groomed backlog and set their priorities only to have clients come in and ask for deadlines and fixed scopes and all the other stuff that is anathema to agile. If you client is able to set priorities effectively and allow a slower, quality-driven model then everything else becomes just so much easier.

[beat]

I just read a marvelous book called Handmade, by a fine furniture woodworker, and something he says over and over is "Go slow to go fast". The sales pitch to the business for a well-controlled agile process is that it maximizes productivity. Shifting priorities and poor planning undermine the productivity of the development team.

[wool_gather]

Ironically, such clients also seem to expect that whatever additions/changes they dream up should be able to be folded in to the plan willy-nilly. Whereas if they accepted an iterative process that would come naturally, without constant re-negotiation or ill will.

[fatnoah]

Scrum is a framework to achieve "agility" and people forget that. The point is agility, not scrum.

[EngineerBetter]

Indeed, and the Scrum-Industrial Complex has vested interests in codifying a certain format that it can sell.

[ako]

And agility in this case being Business Agility: the business being able to change course, not being hold hostage to a years long plan which cannot be changed.

Agility has nothing to do with software development, and everything with business.

[tetha]

I tend to view scrum, kanban, XP and also the more traditional tools like V-model as tool boxes - or maybe some kind of pre-configured framework. They combine agile or other project management tools in order to solve problems the team or stake holders of the team have.

However, this doesn't mean you can't take out and exchange parts. Some teams work profiles fit well with set sprints with a stable set of tasks. Others, like ops work with few people, doesn't due to incalculable factors like incident management. Prioritization might need different mechanics depending on the position and the responsibilities of the team.

It's all a big grab bag of tools to create some working workflow for a team.

[Scarblac]

The point is making valuable software in reasonable time.

Agility is a way to deal with the fact that the idea of what "valuable" is changes constantly.

[EngineerBetter]

Estimates seem to be a common topic in replies.

If you can accurately estimate how long a software task will take, you should have already made a reusable component or automation to generate that code.

Estimates are meaningless. I've seen PhDs waste endless hours faffing with estimate-calculating spreadsheets.

Fundamentally, the universe is unpredictable. Chaotic and complex systems require their starting conditions to be measured to an infinite level of precision to be predictable. The Heisenberg principle means this is, as far as physics can tell, impossible.

On a more practical macro level, a complex adaptive system becomes unpredictable once three feedback loops are present (the three body problem is related).

Modern computer systems are unpredictable because we cannot predict the interplay between levels of abstraction.

It does not matter how smart you are. Unless you have perfect knowledge of all levels of abstraction in the system below you, even in a macroscopic sense you cannot predict the future. Precise estimates will be inaccurate.

Confidence ranges and superprobabilities are of some use. Discrete and precise estimates are an utter waste of time at best, and are dangerous and misleading at worst.

EDIT

Written on a mobile waiting for plane take-off, hence lack of citations. For more on complex adaptive systems, I recommend the works of Murray Gell-Mann and the research output of the Santa Fe Institute, particularly Scott E. Page.

[virtualized]

Another way to put it: If you know how long something will take in advance, you have a solution in mind. It is unlikely that this solution is (A) the best one and (B) the one you will actually implement. It would be stupid to ignore information you learned along the way. If you could actually predict the future you should invest in the lottery, not in software.

EDIT: Of course there are projects where you actually know exactly what to do. Happens a lot in consulting. That has nothing to do with Agile though.

[hrktb]

> people incorrectly focus on sprint commitments.

I think it's often the over approach from the manager/PM side: they will be looking for a methodology to have estimates and team commitment, and Scrum will be an option.

There is an awful lot of PMs who will candidly explain that they don't really care about the methodology, they just need stuff to get done and know when.

[potta_coffee]

"Don't make estimates."

Very few managers / CEOs are going to let you get away with this.

[hopler]

"commitments" do not exist in Agile. Agile was created to remove commitments and insert collaboration in it's place.

You don't have to make big promises when your client has ongoing clear visibility into your progress.

[JohnFen]

That is technically be true, but I've worked at four shops that have implemented Agile methodologies and it hasn't been true for any of them, nor for most of the engineers I personally know but don't work with. I do personally know one person who works on a team that this is true, but he's the only one.

This may be doing Agile wrong, but if something can be so easily done wrong that it's common, I count that as serious flaw in the methodology.

[jayd16]

>Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates.

Said another way, estimates are not promises. Don't crunch to meet them. I think it should be phrased as "no deadlines".

The whole sprint structure is so you're constantly adjusting your plans and estimations at some predictable time. Without a sprint you can end up with randomization.

[asark]

I've noticed some managers and project managers love to emphasize the that sprint plans are "commitments". "OK, is this what we're committing to for this sprint? Is everyone comfortable committing to this?". LOL. OK. Maybe that guilts the young bloods into doing free overtime or something. But no.

It's like when car salesmen try to get you to name a number you'd definitely buy the car for and sign it on some not-at-all-binding-or-official piece of paper, like that means something, before they go back and "ask their boss if they can make it work". Psychological trickery bullshit.

[justjash]

I agree with most of it minus the "Don't make esitmates" part. Without making some sort of estimate things just don't work.

I guess maybe it could work assuming you fully control a single product. Everywhere I have worked we need the estimates simply for coordination of all the moving parts.

[spamizbad]

I think by estimates they might mean deadlines. It’s well worth asking, as an engineer several questions like: “How complicated is this? What are all the moving parts? Whose going to need to be involved to get this out the door?”

But it’s counter productive sometimes to say “ I think feature X will be completed by Y” and then that estimate turns into a deadline.

[eikenberry]

Maybe you could rephrase it to "Don't make estimates before work is well underway". The main problem with estimates is that they are usually just wild guesses and pretty useless. But once you've got going on something, have had time to think it through and test your ideas, you can usually give at least a very rough estimate at that point.

[uhhhhhhh]

>Don't do sprints. Have a continuous backlog. Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates. Always do the simplest thing. Only ever do the most important thing, as defined by the stakeholder.

you just described doing agile wrong...

You're advocating for a version of agile lite, not agile.

Or alternative, agile is different to everyone you talk to and your agile isn't the same as someone elses agile.

Take your pick, but sprints, estimations, not only doing 1 thing/most important things are basic tenants of agile as most people see it.

[fwip]

The only thing consistent about Agile is that everyone is doing it wrong.

[andrewprock]

You are describing Scrum, not Agile. Scrum is a subset of Agile. There are many other Agile methodologies, including what the go outlined.

[jgust]

> Always do the simplest thing.

Can you clarify? If you meant "always search for the simplest solution" I agree. If you meant, "always do the easiest tasks" I don't.

[chrisweekly]

Simple != Easy

I highly recommend this Rich Hickey talk (transcription):

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

[mverwijs]

> The Product Owner prioritises the backlog

Note: This would require a _really_ good product owner that does not merely focusses on features, but also on feasibility and 'fitness functions'.

The rest of that article had me cheering all the way.

[LifeLiverTransp]

Its never the wrong socialism. Maybe actual agile as imagined is incompatible with captialsim and human nature?

[jeletonskelly]

Would you prefer the centralized planning model of waterfall? Of course none of these systems are perfect, but it's been a major step in a better direction for everyone involved.

[jdauriemma]

Agile was created to sell software to clients, so I think was intended to be very compatible with capitalism.

[diminoten]

You have to do estimates, it's how a business works. Not knowing when something will be delivered is too much to ask a company to deal with.

Also, "always do the simplest thing" is one of those phrases that can be twisted and morphed to support literally anything, which makes the phrase useless. It feels good to hear and say, but the reality is it doesn't help you out of a jam.

Sprints are exactly what you're describing, except with accountability built in. That shouldn't scare people, but it does, and that is what causes burnout. Fixing the fear around accountability is how you fix burnout, not eliminating the thing that your boss can use to justify your job.