I find your lack of documentation disturbing.
This is too real for me this early in the morning
I felt a great disturbance in the Roadmap, as if millions of unit tests suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
The requirements have always been the same. Only now they’re reflected more accurately in your docs.
Nope. The requirements were always the same, and you are as far from them right now as you were at the beginning.
we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Or the product manager just now understands them.
Young intern. Only now, at the prerelease meeting, do you understand. Your coding skills are no match for the requirement of the client. You have added the tasks for your lack of vision. Now, young intern, you will refactor.
Best I can do is 12 months late.
Joke’s on you, at the work I’m in we are running a project 32 months late.
what’s your secret name for the project?
In English I guess it would be something like “mother-in-law”.
Apple every year with Intel Macs.
Kid, I been from one side of this fiscal year roadmap to the other. I seen a lotta strange stuff, but I never seen anything that made me believe in some all-powerful process.
Agile
Means we change requirements mid-sprint, right?
Better than continue building something useless.
You might be surprised by how vigorously people will argue against this point.
Effectively?
Yeah, that’s what it means.
If your agile process has requirements and a due date - bad news.
It’s called SAFe and it’s an art form.
Your value stream is showing
Nice. I have a recent story about this.
Basically, we have a process to sell something that is too big, complex and extensive for smaller customers so the idea was to drastically reduce this process to be able to give smaller customers the ability to sell that process.
So, in January, I got an email with the assignment to do this. Since we don’t do it like this, I say he should submit a ticket in our tracker and plan it into a release to have some sort of structure and organisation in what is being done and when. Such a thing should also happen with our project manager because, well, he is the person managing what is being worked on so he should know what is going on and what is important. This doesn’t happen.
4 Months later, the person sending the mail asked me what the status of that is, I didn’t know because I was busy with our other stuff that actually followed our organisation.
This feature is super-duper important and already promised to some customers so it needs to happen quickly. Okay, we plan it in a release and I start working on it. The Plan was that since this was a “1 Task Process”, doing that in our existing process, wouldn’t make much sense and we decided to do this in a separate process that then relies on the codebase of our “main” process. While working on it, more and more issues popped up that made it really complicated to do it like that because our existing code just relied on a lot of things even if they are not in use. This meant that, to use it in the capacity as I needed, I would have to rip a lot of stuff out of the existing codebase and made this more commonly useable even though this wasn’t “used” in the process anyway.
Yes, that sounds weird but you need to know that this is a codebase grown over 15 years so weird things are to be expected.
I do all of that and the sales team has a meeting and I was asked if I had already something that could be presented there, which I had, sort of.
This is presented in that meeting and suddenly this is not enough. “There needs to be other places to be involved in this as well and the customer needs to be able to make changes after the fact”.
So, from the initial “1 Task process” we are now at a more complex process to handle the additional stuff of involving a separate entity of the customer, starting another process and being able to make changes to the initial variables.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with changing things, but the utter lack of thought or planning of the person submitting the feature request is what drives me nuts. I mean, you had 4 months to think about what this should do and all you could come up with were 4 bullet points that just barely resemble the current state. Adding to that, the constant emphasis on “This is important and needs to happen ASAP”. I mean, in literally every mail that person sent to me was the “this is very important, this needs to be priority”.
It is like, yeah dude, I got that the 2nd time you wrote that to me but you could have at least invested some time yourself to properly think about this more than 10 minutes. To maybe notice that what you want isn’t enough to do what you need.
I only wish to have requirements at all
No matter what they say… the requirements are never truly final. They’re just lurking in the shadows, waiting for a rewrite. Much like a Sith.
