Emphatically yes, there's some really broken process out there.
I sat on a team with 6+ hours per week of full-team, in a room, jira ticket creation/reviewing/sizing/prioritizing. So thats 15% overhead right off the top.
This of course was not the only time we spent interacting with tickets, as we then had daily standup, random "check-ins" from product/management on ticket status, and of course actually picking, updating, and closing our own tickets throughout the sprint.
Easily spent 30% of our time talking at high level management view about doing work rather than just technically planning & doing it.
I understand developers’ complaints about this sort of thing and I am as much of a Jira-burnout victim as the next coder.
But.
How much time should a team be spending figuring out what the right thing to do is? Figuring out if the plan is still the right one?
15% honestly doesn’t sound like a number I would automatically assume is ‘too much’ for such activity. I’m not sure even 30% sounds like a crazy high number. Building the wrong thing is expensive. Building pieces that don’t fit together is expensive. Avoiding those mistakes requires investing time in some sort of planning activity.
It doesn’t have to be Jira backlog grooming, sure. But it has to happen.
If the developers aren’t spending their time doing this, who is?
> Figuring out if the plan is still the right one?
15% every week is the problem here. If you spend 10% of your annual budget on upfront planning and 5% monthly on checkins, that's maybe ok. Putting the whole team in a room every week is just going to churn the plan constantly - inputs likely aren't changing with that frequency, and you aren't going to be able to pull in all the other stakeholders that often anyway
> Putting the whole team in a room every week is just going to churn the plan constantly
Yes, that's the point, that after each week (or two) of work, we've learned more and the plan already is outdated and needs to change.
> inputs likely aren't changing with that frequency
In my experience, they absolutely are unless you're building the simplest CRUD app that's identical to one you've built before. The inputs are less often changes from external stakeholders, and more often tasks that are turning out to be more difficult than hoped.
> and you aren't going to be able to pull in all the other stakeholders that often anyway
Of course you are. It's the PM's job to gather the new inputs, go check in with relevant stakeholders (takes a day or two at most), update or re-confirm their priorities, and then make the updated decisions for the next sprint.
In my experience, 15% of time spent each week on planning is about right. It doesn't maximize the productivity of each person coding, but it hugely maximizes the productivity of the whole team in delivering a valuable end result.
My experience with weekly ticket grooming is that most of the time we spent 1-2 hours talking about the exact same tickets we talked about last week and left everything in the exact same order as it was when we started. When working on quarter+ long projects there just wasn't anything that changed week-to-week, and when things did change the actual planning to adapt to that was done immediately, not in the weekly meetings.
What was great with my ticket grooming bi-weeklies was that despite having 20 engineers in a room, we were strongly admonished from going into technical details of implementation in the room. "Take those offline. But please put a size on the ticket, thank you."
What else do you want us to do for 4-6 hours/week? Write poetry?
Eventually every ticket just gets sized "medium-big", and people keep their heads down with mouths closed.
So, in my example, we were having 2-3x/week 2-hour, full dev staff meetings.. without product in the room. He was a very busy man and could only grace us with his presence for 30 min every 2 weeks to basically sort the tickets we had spent 12 hours putting together and decide which he actually cared about.
Much could be accomplished more efficiently by getting product, management, and 1-2 seniors in a room for 30min to actually decide what/if plans have changed & cascade the changes accordingly.
99 times out of 100, the plan didn't change because something raised from the bottom, but because management has changed direction or users have asked for something new. Why subject 95% of the team to hour long monologues?
I don't think that's the case for most of the substantial software projects. The plan for the Linux kernel doesn't change each week (do they have "PMs"?).
15% seems very excessive. Almost a whole day a week and two days lost of deep work. Try to aim for 1.5%. Do as much of the planning as possible without a meeting.
I don’t know how you can get a team of developers to productively spend 39 hours and 24 minutes of keyboard time productively coding in the same direction with only 36 minutes of discussion.
That works great in FAANG companies, you might have 1-3 hours of meetings in total a week. That is how your typical PhD program works too, meet with your supervisor once a week. And low meeting culture seems to work just fine for the Linux kernel developers too. You're always free to engage in extracurricular activities, but it's not mandatory.
It's the lesser tier, often non-tech companies doing this kind of micromanagement.
> isn't interacting with customers frequently enough to upend their plans every 1-2 weeks.
As I said, re-planning is more often than not needed because of technical challenges developers are running into. If one person is going to take 4 weeks to deliver something instead of the expected 2 days, lots of things may have to be rejiggered.
But also, yes even "real product driven company with a mature products" are changing plans every 1-2 weeks. Because each new incremental feature is a little project of its own. I never said plans get "upended" but they absolutely need to get re-adjusted ever 1-2 weeks based on both dev input and product/user reaction.
If you want to talk about the iPhone, just look up the history of how the software keyboard was developed. Talk about rapid prototyping and upending plans!
They absolutely plan where they want to be in 3-6 months -- they're generally quarterly OKR's -- but the only way they consistently achieve their targets is with weekly or biweekly readjustments.
They do, and if you need to adjust a project you don't need 10 hours of weekly planning meetings (the Linux kernel developers don't need it, so your CRUD app developers don't either).
The higher you go, the less agile it gets, because that's a horrible way to develop software, or any high-skill professional service or product.
Sorry, are you suggesting a better way to operate is to have the team go off for like a five week offsite to come up with a plan for the rest of the year? Then once a month, they get a day to figure out if the plan’s still working?
It’s an option, I guess… let us know how it works out for you.
That's a horrible idea for sure, but I'm not sure the current model being derided works for all team compositions either.
In a 20+ person dev team with a lot of juniors, the team is not "coming up with a plan" or "deciding if its still working" so much as product/tech lead/a couple seniors who have zones of responsibility are handing one down. The two hours spent in the room is agile kayfabe.
"Get everyone in a room and hash it out for 2 hours" is maybe a model that works at team size of 5, senior, empowered engineers, but it is not something that works at large scales.
I mean... yeah. That's kind of how a lot of big enterprise projects with VP-level visibility get managed (I participated in versions of this at both Amazon and Facebook)
Obviously you don't need to pull all the junior eng offsite for a whole month, but the engineering leads + PMs + engineering management end up there. And obviously there's also ongoing prioritisation happening between leads/PM/management throughout the year - but that doesn't require pulling the whole team every week.
Yeah, I think this level of planning has gotten lost in our recent fad of agileness.
Senior management thinks they know where they want to be in 3 years, but there is no cascading multi-quarter, let alone multi-year planning of the projects & steps to get there.
I've even been in orgs where someone senior is trying to make very very large org & tech changes, and really can't be bothered to put the big building block steps to get from here to there. As it turns out, they never get "there".
Somehow they know enough to bring in project managers for big concrete things like "retire a datacenter" and go all out with MS Project, GANTT, etc.
However when it comes to software changes like "split an on-prem Java monolith into a fleet of python micro services in the cloud" ... it's all iterative vibes the whole way.
Agileness is many things but I really think we can stop thinking of it as a ‘recent fad’ by now. The manifesto was written 22 years ago. It’s been the dominant mode of engineering organization for over a decade.
> Building the wrong thing is expensive. Building pieces that don’t fit together is expensive. Avoiding those mistakes requires investing time in some sort of planning activity.
The promise of "agile" is, IIRC, faster turnaround and iterative development. Yes, the 'wrong' thing is expensive. Getting something basic in someone's hands in 2-3 days to get some feedback is usually more productive than days of figma then 'sign off' then work work work then putting it in hands and getting back "this is wrong" (missing data, etc). Sometimes those things can be found in 'design-only' sessions, but I've rarely seen it happen where lots is found there, then things are implemented perfectly afterwards not requiring any further changes.
Much depends on the size/scope of the work, and I don't think there's one-size that fits all, but the ticketization of work process as teams grow pushes towards "one true way", which then seems to paper over a lot of cracks that don't easily show up in burndown charts.
That 15 or 30% might be the time ultimately taken on thinking/planning/etc of a specific issue, but too often it seems there's an idea of doing more up front "gets it done" and the notion of fast feedback/iteration cycles is glossed over, and you're expected to "get it done" - "all the planning was already done".
When doing dev-type work, I always end up needing to iterate with endusers/stakeholders, and there's little 'up front' that could have been planned to avoid some of that. It may be the nature of the people/teams I've worked with, though.
Yeah and the larger issue - putting 20 people in a room for 2 hours violates like every single management / efficiency / socio-political recommendation in the book.
The more people in the room, the fewer participate, the fewer decisions get made, the more gets punted to the next time 20 people are in the room again in 3 days.
arguably the goal of any software project is... working software, no?
i understand your point, but also think 'agile' is at least as much of a 'how' as much as a 'what', especially over the last 5 years or so.
"agile" itself would seem to be a 'how'. "agile software development" as a phrase is describing - at least too many folks - 'how' the software development will be carried out.
but... it's also a massive amount of hair splitting it seems.
People should absolutely be planning their work. Measure twice, cut once.
But then again, isn't agile supposed to be iterative?
Measure, cut, measure, cut, measure, cut.. repeat?
How much value do you get from putting 20 engineers in a conference room for 2 hours, 2-3 times per week? What if this is mostly just a head strong manager who enjoy monologuing his captive audience team?
Note I said "spent 30% of our time talking at high level management view about doing work rather than just technically planning & doing it"
This doesn't really help prevent building things that don't fit together at all. It barely allows you to surface technical dependencies and order of operations.
> How much time should a team be spending figuring out what the right thing to do is? Figuring out if the plan is still the right one?
Keep in mind that in most "jira-oriented" places (or probably all of them), that task isn't attributed to developers at all.
If you are doing this and development, like a healthy place, yes, 30% of the time evaluating your work sounds sane. But that evaluation time must not be interleaved with development time at all. Any interleaving will destroy the value of both tasks.
I sat on a team with 6+ hours per week of full-team, in a room, jira ticket creation/reviewing/sizing/prioritizing. So thats 15% overhead right off the top.
This of course was not the only time we spent interacting with tickets, as we then had daily standup, random "check-ins" from product/management on ticket status, and of course actually picking, updating, and closing our own tickets throughout the sprint.
Easily spent 30% of our time talking at high level management view about doing work rather than just technically planning & doing it.