Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Why management continues to confuse me

Our Agile development timeline goes something like this. Releases are six iterations long and iterations are two weeks long. Each iteration has Stories and Tasks which are entered into a database and "burned up". If you "burn up" correctly, your completed work matches your estimated work. If you match, it means you're either a perfect estimator or lying.

One of the nice things about Agile is it keeps the lying to a minimum. You can still do it, but the general idea is you expose yourself to everyone to make sure everyone knows who is doing what and when "what" will be completed. Works pretty well.

I'm now overhearing a covert plan by our esteemed management to sneak in a Agile iteration and have it excluded from the said "burn up" data. Or in other words, we want a two-week span of time where we can do work, but not show others that we're doing work. This should be good.

4 comments:

David said...

That sounds like cheating?

Mac Noland said...

It is. And what's even better, we have spent 2 man days modifying the reporting to exclude this time so it doesn't look like we're cheating. If we didn't modify the reporting, the burn-up would flat line.

I'm selling my stock.

David said...

Jeez, didn't anyone say, "Isn't this cheating? Why are we cheating?"

David said...

I am sure that would have been met with:

*crickets*

Moving right along...