IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Deathwing said:

I'm still working through a significant backlog from the merger. None of our testing infrastructure worked with theirs, so I'm having to reimplement most of our test suites. We just got attachments back last week, after more than a year without them. Imagine diagnosing failures with the relevant logs missing(AI was actually quite useful here).

But, it's probably myopic to blame just that. Engineers suck at estimating task effort and I'm no exception. We've actually given up on assigning any estimate. So planning is just this kind of "yeah, that'll fit" guessing game.

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Ah yeah I think this is probably part of the problem. Also sounds like you're working off hours too - what if you just stop doing that?

Deathwing said:

Yes, sometime during standup, but often during weekly meetings.

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as much as i loath meetings, especially in the office, this is one case where a big whiteboard with all of your sprint postits comes in handy.
"great! i'll get your 10 new postits added right now! which ten current ones should move to the "these get fucked" stack?"

Deathwing said:

I honestly don't know. It's a fair question and I don't know why I'm not more insistent about sticking to regular working hours despite being sick of it. I've become more non-confrontational as I've aged and I don't like letting others down. Off hours work is often catching up on stuff I feel is blocking others, like reviewing MRs. AI has made that worse recently.

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Not judging as I've been in some serious crunches - but does anyone else work this much? Your boss maybe?

In my opinion, just based on what you said, your team really needs better sprint planning and as Control said you need to move less important things out if they're coming in like that. There are always going to be spikes, but there needs to be some give and take with that. When we take a spike, we move something else completely out of the spring unless we think it's a story that someone else can swarm on. Now... I hate scrum terms, but it's the easiest way to describe what I mean.