by blizkreeg on 9/30/21, 11:16 PM with 3 comments
The PM/EM writes a bunch of poorly detailed tickets (often with no detail) and expects devs to deliver on them. Is this the situation in your team too? If there is detail, it's usually a few hastily written lines in the JIRA ticket description with the rest left to the developer to figure out, fill in the blanks on, or ask questions around.
1. have you experienced this? and if so, have you seen that this leads to poorer quality deliverables or does it not have any impact?
2. what would you fix about this process (systems, people, tools) to make it better?
by PaulHoule on 10/1/21, 3:00 AM
I think about it a bit, spend ten minutes talking to the person who wrote the ticket, turn the ticket into a good ticket, and proceed.
The effort to do that is maybe 5% of the work to complete the ticket so I can't complain.
Even though we do sprints what we are doing is really kanban where the main focus is finishing what we start and not having excess WIP. If a ticket takes a sprint and a half to finish, there is always something from the backlog to add to the sprint.
There are many ways to use a ticket system. One of the times I was happiest was when I was able to quickly break down my work into 10-20 minute subtasks and make super-accurate estimates. That was dependent on having a framework in which the tasks were predictable and also quickly punching tasks into a spreadsheet. If the work involved a lot of struggling with the runtime, build system, algorithms, database, etc. that kind of predictability is impossible.
There is always some disconnect between "what we say we do" and "what we really do" in a ticket system. Those agreements and disagreements can drive people crazy (fine-grained tasks help me focus but will drive many people up the wall) but it's also possible to reach an accommodation where work gets done without a lot of space.
(e.g. it drove me nuts to write a daily standup summary of yesterday and today in the morning with the rest of my team. in the morning I'd find it hard to remember exactly what i did yesterday and what I was planning to do last afternoon and it would slow me down getting to work. Now I write my summary when I leave with the headlines "what i did" and "what i plan to do" that recognizes that those things don't always agree. Those notes help me get started in the morning and nobody complains I am 180° out of phase.)
by nick0001 on 10/1/21, 1:06 AM
Hire someone to help you offload tasks so you can focus on long term growth or to help you with the long term vision.
If resources are limited, at least take a week or 2 to plan this road map.
(I am in a similar situation)
by postno123456789 on 10/1/21, 12:15 AM
Change? Use the cards as a guide only.