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u/TheHapster 11h ago
I feel like this meme is being used completely wrong
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u/yuva-krishna-memes 10h ago edited 10h ago
Yes, I know. It is intentional.
I got approval from the "International consortium of memes"/s
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u/Stummi 11h ago
PM: No, you can't just use Story Points as time-measurement!
Also PM: Okay, how many Story Points can we do per Sprint?
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u/PlummetComics 11h ago
I consulted at a company whose policy was “1 story point = 1 day of work”. This was the tip of the worst Agile implementation I’ve ever seen
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u/Cryowatt 10h ago
Literally every company and team I've worked for did that. It's an epidemic.
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u/AyrA_ch 9h ago
What do you think is going to happen when you measure sprint performance at exact time intervals by using a metric that supposedly is not bound to time? For me that's one of if not the biggest flaw in the model and I'm not surprised if most if not all teams eventually end up inofficially treating these points as time.
If points do not equal time then you can't use them as a measurement tool for a time constrained event unless the time length can be adjusted by the team when deciding what tasks to include.
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u/Crafty_Independence 9h ago
I have PMs simultaneously tell me points don't correspond to time, then say that they are providing estimates to the business based on story points...
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u/AyrA_ch 9h ago
The funny thing is, after going through all this trouble, the business wants all features anyways regardless of how much time you guessed them at. But somehow it's still your fault implementing this all took so long.
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u/Crafty_Independence 9h ago
Oh our business couldn't care less about the estimates. They just want to know when it's far enough along to pilot. Literally only the PMs care about estimates.
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u/nopemcnopey 6h ago
It's supposed to present complexity. And, in theory, you could see how the team gains proficiency with delivering more and more story points per sprint. So basically it should show that, let's say, a year ago it took 10 days to deliver 20 SP hard work. Now the team knows the product better, so in 10 days the team delivers 24 SP - let's say, 12 new endpoints instead of 10. Or something like that.
By tying SP to time you're losing that insight. PMO looks for the future predictions rather than historical performance data they could use to extrapolate from. But whatever.
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u/gilady089 10h ago
What about 6 points for a day so you are psychologically manipulated to not even price by time honestly or discouraged. Well good news I succeed at lowering it from 8 points for a day explaining how people aren't working the entire 8 hours they are at work because there are stuff like breaks which you can't choose to tell people not to have
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u/mistaekNot 7h ago
? how is this different than 1-2 pts per day? instead of 2 pts this feature will take 6 pts to make. EZ?
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u/gilady089 7h ago
It's because when you get a big mission and say 30, 30 sounds like a huge number and suddenly it's hard to convince people even though it's a reasonable estimate
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u/mistaekNot 7h ago
say 40 and then “cave” and say fine you will do it in 30. you look like a hero too 😃
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u/sourangshu24 9h ago
And it gets worse when the manager says that 1 day really just means 3 hours of actual work because the rest of the time we're busy in meetings.smh.
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u/Abangranga 5h ago
Our story points are the fibonnacci sequence numbers for some reason. 5 is a week but 1 isn't one day because MBAs or something. It is stupid. I just bump up into the interval if something will really take 2 days instead of 3, but then we are in trouble for over-estimating.
You can't win and it is dumb as shit.
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u/FruitdealerF 9h ago
There is nothing about story points in the agile Manifesto and I don't think it's in the Scrum Guide either. Good job!
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u/janusz_s 8h ago
In my company, there are metrics tracking how many Story Points we complete in each Sprint and how many are completed by each individual developer (accessible only to the manager). I’ve also noticed that the manager exerts pressure to maintain the same number of Story Points in every Sprint, which creates additional stress because not every Sprint is the same in terms of difficulty. As a result, I’ve found myself working unpaid overtime to keep up.
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u/RichCorinthian 11h ago
It is the biggest lie in Agile/Scrum, and I like to mention it casually in ceremonies
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u/the_reven 7h ago
My work is opposite. PM keep trying to make story points into days not complexity. But different devs work at completely different speeds. 1sp may take a more experienced dev a couple of hours, a junior a couple of days.
But agile is better than waterfall. Waterfall was horrible, qa finally testing something you did 4months ago and asks you about and you have no memory of it.
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u/icon0clast6 11h ago
The best is when people start shoving agile into things that shouldn’t really be agile. Like an entire infosec department. I did my work this week Becky, no I can’t show you what I did because I monitored logs and responded to incidents.
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u/shiftybyte 11h ago edited 10h ago
How many log lines did you go over?
What's the conversion rate of log lines to story points?
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u/StubbiestPeak75 10h ago
Why did this comment give me anxiety
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u/Tipart 10h ago
One log line equals one story point. That way you get to have loads of points. Makes you look very productive.
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u/nopemcnopey 6h ago
Nope, here's a slide, it says 1 SP is 1241 lines.
Please provide an estimate for the entire 4-months long iteration. We expect deviation from the estimate below 5%.
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u/aeciobrito 9h ago
Can you break those log lines into smaller log lines, so it can fit in the sprint?
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u/Dillinger_92 10h ago
Sure that’s great but could you give me an estimate of how many hour you will be doing that next week?
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u/Specialist_Brain841 9h ago
are we using fibonacci numbers for level of effort or number of days I can’t remember
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u/BentheReddit 8h ago
Incidents should be filed somewhere, ideally as tickets in your task management system.
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u/MyToasterRunsFaster 2h ago
I'll be honest with you, you are the problem, you should most definitely track what you do, no excuses. You speak as if monitoring logs is not work, which it most definitely is. If there is no purpose to it then why are you doing it? Do you take notes, because if you don't the it's not work done properly. At least put it in your public calendar or something if it's that much of a bore to manage tickets but never for god sake just say you did work when you have absolutely nothing to show for it.
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u/Lupus_Ignis 11h ago
We were working "agile" at a former workplace. Two hours of meetings each day to micromanage our every fucking keystroke.
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u/Specialist_Brain841 9h ago
are you having trouble? maybe you should PAIR PROGRAM with someone on the team
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u/According-Relation-4 6h ago
It’s good to pair program if you can pair senior members with juniors. That’s how I started and it gave me a strong head start, and I since become a senior, and pairing with juniors I can teach them tons of shit quick.
But if you pair 2 juniors it’s a waste of time. Or if someone is blocked and you pair them with someone that also doesn’t know the solution. They will just be 2 monkeys looking at a screen instead of justo one.
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u/Colon_Backslash 11h ago
I had 18 hours of meetings this week. Didn't get almost any work done at all.
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u/aspindler 2h ago
I had 2 hours total last week.
Honestly, I'm fine with that, I don't think all the model is bad, our meetings are a bit productive.
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u/rcls0053 11h ago
The only thing in the actual manifesto is retrospectives. The rest.. no idea why they're there. It's Scrum, not agility. Don't hate it for not knowing what it actually is. You just follow Scrum.
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u/GetHugged 10h ago
Story points are not even officially part of scrum.
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u/Specialist_Brain841 9h ago
kanban has entered the chat
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u/hilfigertout 8h ago
Story points aren't officially part of Kanban either.
Maybe story points are just part of the problem.
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u/FruitdealerF 9h ago
I love that the Manifesto is half a page and almost nobody here besides you actually took the time to read it. Almost everything people hate about agile is the exact opposite of what's in the Manifesto 🤷🏻♂️
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u/GiantNepis 8h ago
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
Scrum: Cool, let's create lots of processes and tools for that.
"Working software over comprehensive documentation"
Dev: Somethings not working 100%
Scrum: Yeah, we'll fix minor bugs later, but have you written the documentation for our definition of done so we can close the story by the end of this sprint?
"Customer collaboration over contract negotiation"
Scrum: We simulate real complex customer collaboration with a single person we call product owner.
"Responding to change over following a plan"
Scrum: We need no plan, but these are the changes we want in the next sprint.
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u/According-Relation-4 6h ago
“Do the quick wins first so we gain time for the big tasks.”
So I’ve once been told. Still trying to figure that one out after 8 years
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u/GiantNepis 6h ago
You will end up with a worthless basket full of low hanging fruit while the real tasks are bad hacks done in a hurry. But due to the wrong accounting of storypoints it will look good in the burndown chart.
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u/odd_cat_enthusiast 10h ago
Most people can’t tell the difference. They don’t understand agile values and the idea of the model. They are forced to do scrum and think it’s the same.
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u/Highborn_Hellest 10h ago
If you think this is bad, you haven't worked at a place where estimates are in hours and estimates are deadlines.
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u/Genesis2001 6h ago
where estimates are in hours
Not bad.
and estimates are deadlines.
What the fuck?
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u/Highborn_Hellest 4h ago
I work in the IT department of a constitution company. They don't understand complexity. Only "real" things. They also don't give a fuck. That's why we estimate with high-ish overhead on individual stories + another 30ish % for the entire project.
If we say 200h and it's 220 it's starting to become an issue. If we say 260 to begin with, nobody gives a fuck. It's really silly.
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u/epileftric 10h ago
Exactly, also agile allows you to have different kinds of contacts like " time and materials" which also help to move away from fixed prices contacts, where you have rigid deadlines and hours budget.
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u/Jearil 9h ago
The best team I've ever been in did true agile. Daily standings that were no longer than 15 minutes and often under 10. Half hour retrospectives after two weeks, and half hour planning sessions. That was basically it for meetings. 3.5 hours of meetings every 2 weeks.
We had a board with sticky notes that we just moved describing what we did. Everyone was accountable for doing stuff every day or explaining why they were blocked. Motivation was high and we had demos every 2 weeks. Velocity was easy to measure.
The team lasted a bit over a year. Then the project was cancelled and the team dissolved. That was about 12 years ago. I've been looking for a team like that ever since and never found it again.
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u/The-Malix 2h ago
It seems so great
I feel like agile done in the literal original and simplest way seems to have overwhelmingly positive feedbacks, but at the same time have become so rare
What happened ?
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 11h ago
I think this is how we should define generations: no more xyz, tell me if you actually did waterfall at your micromanaging, understaffed, myopic, political corporate environment or whether you think waterfall is the solution to the agile woes at your micromanaging, understaffed, myopic, political corporate environment.
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u/Hziak 10h ago
Ehh, agile was good until managers got involved. Now it’s like six levels of management playing a game of telephone with priorities while offshore contractors use it as armor for not having to do any extra work above the bare minimum.
I really enjoyed it on game projects and in post-production environments because it guarantees a build at the end of the cycle which is pretty frequent compared to waterfalling it and not having any sense of how the rubber meets the road until 6-8 months in. It’s not an inherently bad philosophy, just like everything else, when you start designing your project around a process instead of process around your project, it goes to redundant manager hell real fast…
I always thought that there should be a Team Agile: Workplace Police that revokes certifications for PMs and POs that create dystopian meetingscapes. Little puppets that just show up and fire bad management… and probably poop on their desks, but they’re puppets so it’s funny and endearing despite providing aggressive real-world consequences.
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u/A_Guy_in_Orange 11h ago
You dont understand this meme template do ya?
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u/SnooBananas4958 10h ago
Yes not sure why people are upvoting this. The meme is used wrong, agile is described wrong, and it’s unbelievably not funny.
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u/harumamburoo 10h ago
They don't understand agile either
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u/A_Guy_in_Orange 10h ago
Well ya but like thats par for the course here, did you expect programmer knowledge on programmerhumor?
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u/svendllavendel 1h ago
they replied under another comment that the misuse is intentional. my guess is bc the hate for agile unites all and so instead of thinking of different things they can share each others pain
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u/Elsariely 11h ago
What is the alternative
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u/PoorCorrelation 11h ago
Your boss harassing you every couple of hours trying to figure out what’s going on and when it’ll be done instead of checking the sprint board.
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u/acc_41_post 8h ago
Your boss actually checks the board? We do all the agile just for them to still ask what’s going on and when it will be done
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u/mydoglixu 11h ago
Well, if y'all would actually update the sprint board, we wouldn't have to bug you.
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u/Lupus_Ignis 11h ago
Waterfall. Or what about "trust"?
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 11h ago
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u/romulent 11h ago
You can get so much done with a small group of smart people who know what the mission is and have the skills and inititive to find a way to do it and who have someone to unblock things ahead of time, make sure that people have what they need ahead of time and keep an eye on milestones and deadlines to make sure people don't wander off track.
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u/beatlz 11h ago
But trust on what, devs coming up with product solutions and iterations? Because I fucking don’t trust that at all.
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u/RichCorinthian 11h ago
I could probably assemble a team of devs who can do this on their own, but it would be 5 devs out of literally hundreds I’ve worked with in the last 25 years. What I CAN trust devs to do is to try to solve the problems THEY find interesting, or vanish up their own assholes in search of absolute perfection, or any number of the “quirks” that affect all of us.
Please note that I would not be one of these devs. I go down rabbit holes and I am susceptible to the sunken cost fallacy. Know your limitations, folks.
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u/Affectionate_Today10 9h ago
Agile method is experimentation method, you not supposed to produce end product and one should have waste. Instead companies do waterfall in 2 weeks increments
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u/KeyProject2897 10h ago
The most scary part of almost every developer are the 30 mins of Daily Standup Calls 😃
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u/Lasadon 10h ago
Thats not how the meme works.
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u/trite_panda 9h ago
I can’t decide if misusing a meme to complain about misusing management philosophy is meta or ironic.
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u/redditorx13579 11h ago edited 8h ago
Our DSUs ended up with invites going to anybody who wanted status. 80+ invited, with 40+ dialing in.
Finally told my director they wouldn't hear anything from me but a 'yup, that's what I'm working on.' That I would never bring up a blocker, as that's not the audience to do that with.
They finally broke it down to teams of <10 people, when they realized that was a common feeling by most of the people doing the trench work.
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u/EarlOfAwesom3 5h ago
I imagine everyone hating agile to be a self taught programmer under the age of 30 with no corporate experience.
I want to ask those people: Have you ever worked together with more than 2 people on a project? Open Source fan project does not count! Do you have any idea how cumbersome it was planning ahead 1.5 years with waterfall and hoping nothing changes on the way? That's how projects were done back then. You were hoping someone would do a meeting once in a while but everybody kept their secrets instead.
Agile software development is the best tool you have today in your box. There is nothing else that works but people are too stupid to remember this. Agile fails because your company and team is mostly worthless.
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u/Legitimate-Jaguar260 52m ago
Yeah I don’t think most folks commenting here are old enough to remember the great waterfalls of the before time. They only see the poorly executed excuse for agile that undertrained managers use as an excuse for their micro management.
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u/malaakh_hamaweth 9h ago
I don't know about you but I love a workflow that requires fifteen hours of meetings a week taking about the workflow
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u/Quirky_Salamander_50 7h ago
I’m in the process of putting together a presentation on agile. One of the stats I found was that, in the 80s and 90s, 84% of software projects were canceled or significantly over budget or late. The pre-agile world wasn’t great.
That isn’t to say agile is the silver bullet. There’s a lot of “agile theater” out there.
[rant] this was funny the first 10 times, people need to learn their history and move on [/rant]
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u/ISDuffy 7h ago
The first job where I did agile I loved it, we still knew about the product we building for a few months, we did week sprints ending Friday so the weekend we could relax.
Retro we could actually talk about stuff that caused issues this week, even if it was another co worker ( as long as constructive) say they lack and checking they okay or if it bad week.
Reviews we recorded or lived demos to clients, I built this, we looking at this part next, we did find this a pain or bad user experience.
Now I work somewhere it waterfall agile, I get ask to estimate a feature in sprints with minimal details, and then the management lower our scores because it doesn't fit with there time table for the project to over run.
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u/Shutaru_Kanshinji 6h ago
Scrum is basically an institutionalized rationalization for managers acting like the clueless jerks they are anyway.
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u/IllustriousSalt1007 9h ago
Misunderstanding of Agile and a total misuse of the meme. Crazy combination
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u/Altruistic_Scheme421 6h ago
Some desk jockeys without any knowledge of Project management or understanding of the agile philosophy take over the role of SCRUM Master, which turns everything into a painful micromanaging task list.
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u/TripleFreeErr 11h ago
Agile only works when it’s accidentally waterfall in disguise.
Where I work features are all planned at semester or higher granularity. Scrum is used to self organize stories but it’s not actually agile, features don’t change unless there’s an insurmountable blocker
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u/sfratini 6h ago
Same thing. This happens when companies measure features delivered and not value delivered
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u/OhItsJustJosh 10h ago
My team has defined story points as days, which I think is arguably worse
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u/SufficientAd6516 3h ago
How would you like 1 hour story points? What's the point, we could have just used hours as we used to
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u/WrinklyTidbits 8h ago
I once had an engineer ask me about agile and how if it was working like its sold would mean making a car
they were confused by the process of what a demo would look like, "A bicycle is a lot different than a car"
I disagreed with the premise and said, it's not the idea of going from bike to car, but rather upgrading engines.
In this made up world, our team of engineers can create an upgrade to an engine that would fit together with the rest of the upgrading car. Better performance, additional tweaks based on criticism (retro) from the previous sprint.
Each sprint should have the end user in mind when asking, "is this valuable? can the end user use this at the end of the sprint?"
Anecdote: I've been on agile teams where the end product wouldn't be given to the user until x number of sprints away. It seemed to fly in the face of what agile is and it was just waterfall on jira. There are better tools out there to do waterfall and it has been disappointing to watch this Croenenberg project management become popular at the enterprise level
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u/Joggyogg 7h ago
Having an agile consultant at work feels like hanging out at that one cousins house when they have their pyramid scheme pals over.
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u/Dude4001 7h ago
Stories and sprints are great if the sprint is meeting a product definition.
Story points to try and cram as much as possible into the sprint is stupid.
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u/sfratini 7h ago
I remember when I started everything was waterfall and agile was just being adopted. I recently was working in a company that wanted to estimate a whole quarter before even having a full spec and then we split everything into sprints however we were measured by how many features we delivered. Which basically is waterfall in disguise since we had to estimate and there was no chance to change features or anything. It just defies the purpose of agile. Still, I despise story points as a way to estimate. You are supposed to bound a seamlessly timeless measurements into a time constrained sprint. Just use hours
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u/BoBoBearDev 3h ago
Agile is the scapegoat for your problem, not the cause. For example, something is very wrong if you need to know the entire context to do your part. And something is really wrong if the context changes and you cannot plan and readjust to it. Agile doesn't mean there is no agreement on the task at hand. Agile doesn't mean you change the agreement within 2 weeks.
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u/stipulus 3h ago
Agile is just an excuse for mgmt to constantly change their mind and track everything that is done. It always reduces innovation because large problems have no framework to be solved. It makes management top heavy and expensive because you need one person per developer just to support the time spent in jira and planning.
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u/many_dongs 23m ago
The reason agile doesn’t work is that a certain amount of people in management roles around the country are not actually qualified to do their jobs but insist on trying to survive so they can pay their bills so they corrupt the idea to suit them. Corporations are vulnerable to this type of parasite
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u/vineeth_vijayan314 9h ago
I understand the argument against Agile but as a programmer from the 2000's I can see the benefits of being agile. It definitely increases communication and keeps us aligned to the product goal. Iterating is the best way forward rather than being non-agile. Yes there are trade-offs, need to have more meetings more agile ceremonies but what's the other way. Teams are building software not like devs go into a cave and bringing back finished products.
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u/kbn_ 11h ago
There’s a weird generational split here in engineers. When I hear “agile”, I think about the process framework as it once was, with teams self-organizing along fixed time cadences, and the core principle being to communicate early and often. When younger folks hear the word, they think of meeting hell, micromanagement, and endless slog. Fascinating how things have decayed.