I usually just do this when a jr has fallen in love with a piece of work and wants to keep polishing it. They start to confuse “I could do X” with “I should do X”… And confuse “less than perfect but still acceptable” with “bug”.
I tell them to slap it on the backlog and to move on.
We have backlog grooming meetings every few weeks. If they still actually want to do it, we can talk, but like 19 times out of 20 they’ve found a new shiny rock by then anyways, and we’re now in a position where we can both agree it isn’t a good use of our time, and close it out as a “will not do”.
You don’t need aggressive POs or scrum masters to operate as a pragmatic team. I far prefer having a lean overhead. When there are more people shouting directions than people actually coding you’ve got too many cooks.
It’s interesting how people have different interpretations of mwmes. You took it as a reflection of a perfectly normal good thing, while I took it as a perfectly normal bad thing.
Iny experience, “put it on the backlog (and never look at it again)” is the response to someone raising a serious architectural problem.
Yeah exactly. I think you hit the nail on the head with the “(and never look at it again)”.
It’s not explicit in the meme. “Not doing it” and “never look at it” are totally different things… But I think you’ll fill it in based on your personal experience.
I’m sorry your backlog doesn’t get regularly revisited.
If I were you, I’d push for setting aside time to get it under control.
If your backlog is gigantic, I expect there will be pushback just because once the problem gets sufficiently large nobody is brave enough to broach it.
But, you can apply story slicing skills to these kinds of problems too. Break it down into smaller bits with clear and realistic objectives. Setting aside 30 minutes with the goal of, say, picking 5 items on your backlog that you know you won’t ever do because they’re super low value? Pick 5 items and close them off as won’t do. Baby steps.
Currently, I am not living this hell. But I gotta tell you, you are supporting a pipe dream.
Literally, if I cannot describe a direct benefit to the so-called end user it won’t even be looked at. The development and engineering team are unimportant. The first part I was told directly, the second part was implicit.
Most corporate environments use scrum or agile as ceremony - decorations to make everybody think they’re doing something better than what they’re really doing. Then when it fails, they can go back to what they were really doing and claim agile was just a fad.
That’s why scrum teams need aggressive POs and scrum masters.
I’m the Sr. Dev in this meme.
I usually just do this when a jr has fallen in love with a piece of work and wants to keep polishing it. They start to confuse “I could do X” with “I should do X”… And confuse “less than perfect but still acceptable” with “bug”.
I tell them to slap it on the backlog and to move on.
We have backlog grooming meetings every few weeks. If they still actually want to do it, we can talk, but like 19 times out of 20 they’ve found a new shiny rock by then anyways, and we’re now in a position where we can both agree it isn’t a good use of our time, and close it out as a “will not do”.
You don’t need aggressive POs or scrum masters to operate as a pragmatic team. I far prefer having a lean overhead. When there are more people shouting directions than people actually coding you’ve got too many cooks.
It’s interesting how people have different interpretations of mwmes. You took it as a reflection of a perfectly normal good thing, while I took it as a perfectly normal bad thing.
Iny experience, “put it on the backlog (and never look at it again)” is the response to someone raising a serious architectural problem.
Yeah exactly. I think you hit the nail on the head with the “(and never look at it again)”.
It’s not explicit in the meme. “Not doing it” and “never look at it” are totally different things… But I think you’ll fill it in based on your personal experience.
I’m sorry your backlog doesn’t get regularly revisited.
If I were you, I’d push for setting aside time to get it under control.
If your backlog is gigantic, I expect there will be pushback just because once the problem gets sufficiently large nobody is brave enough to broach it.
But, you can apply story slicing skills to these kinds of problems too. Break it down into smaller bits with clear and realistic objectives. Setting aside 30 minutes with the goal of, say, picking 5 items on your backlog that you know you won’t ever do because they’re super low value? Pick 5 items and close them off as won’t do. Baby steps.
Currently, I am not living this hell. But I gotta tell you, you are supporting a pipe dream.
Literally, if I cannot describe a direct benefit to the so-called end user it won’t even be looked at. The development and engineering team are unimportant. The first part I was told directly, the second part was implicit.
Most corporate environments use scrum or agile as ceremony - decorations to make everybody think they’re doing something better than what they’re really doing. Then when it fails, they can go back to what they were really doing and claim agile was just a fad.
I mean “imperfect” is a bug oftentimes. The other version of imperfect is “missing a feature”
Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just “I can refactor this to use X pattern”. Or “I COULD push X logic to some other layer”
Ha ha what about when the shouters:coders ratio hits 10:1?
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No matter how aggressive PO & SM are they don’t get to decide priority.
Yep. Gotta clean out that backlog by deleting the stuff that will never get done.