[kylecordes]

I followed a few links, and didn't see much background information about Ben's experience with companies using JIRA at scale; from the tone of the posted sounds like he is seen some bad management and action.

But here's another point of view; at work we (among other things) train and consult companies on effective use of JIRA. As best we can tell, our students and clients are well-intentioned, trying to use JIRA for good, not for evil. They often want something similar to what Ben wrote about, to get numerous projects and teams across a large organization using the same tracking tool (JIRA) in approximately the same way, with local variations as needed but avoiding pointless variations.

I've actually not heard of any of them trying to "ensure velocity parity", but rather the typical goal is to be able to roll up and understand project status and progress across a large and sprawling organization working on goals that far exceed what an individual team could do. This seems like a worthy and important goal.

[thachmai]

> able to roll up and understand project status and progress across a large and sprawling organization working on goals

The major problem with that is we are incredibly good at gaming the system. I've seen mediocre, at best, team became a glowing beacon under the velocity game; they managed to close 2000+ stories in one year! (a developer closed well over 1 story per day on average).

Software estimation is a really hard problem. We can attempt to establish order by pretending that burning down/velocity charts actually say something useful. How do they work when all the methods we know fail? No idea. But have faith, because we have plenty of anecdotes of its success!