[PaulHoule]

It is "failure to use issue tracker effectively" and it happens all the time.

The problem is confounded by many little cuts. For instance, they think that the issue tracking system is only used by devs, so it goes on a dust-filled desktop machine from '03 that is stuffed in a corner somewhere, so it is underpowered and takes 25 seconds to load a page over my DSL connection and about 22 seconds at the office.

The people at the office don't care, however, because the boss thinks the issue tracking system is a waste of time. He bitches me out for taking 10 minutes to write up an estimate and then giving an estimate which is always "too long." I am carefully watching the star programmer to understand what he does right, and finally realize the reason he doesn't have this problem is that he doesn't estimate anything. Sometimes the testers put in tickets, and sometimes the star programmer puts one in, but the "product owner" never puts one in or bothers to show up at the scrum meetings down the hall.

Top management assigned a project manager to our team and she was putting in the scrum thing because my team had been going in circles for two years and they had to get a product in front of the customer. My boss pushed her out and she left to work for some kind of Christian charity.

At some point our boss got the religion of checklists, gave up on the idea of estimating or scheduling, and somehow we got it across the finish line.