[noxToken]

>Don't do sprints. Have a continuous backlog. Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates. Always do the simplest thing. Only ever do the most important thing, as defined by the stakeholder.

The problem with this is that the stakeholder might not understand what simple means. It happens here all the time.

We get "simple" requests for verbiage changes, but after reviewing the story, the verbiage request isn't universal. It only applies to certain offerings, and the stakeholders only want the verbiage the be applied after a certain step in the application. This is still a relatively simple change, but when factoring in all the other "simple" requests that involve complex logic, changing displayed text becomes relatively complex.

We do sprints because it's our time box to see how close we are to hitting the mark. A sprint isn't a hard deadline in which the team must kill themselves to get everything finished. It's an arbitrary passage of time for setting goal to keep on track with what is going to be released. If you have something that's releasing two months into the future, it's easy to say that you can still make time although your first two weeks were riddled with unexpected complications and stoppages. A sprint forces us to focus on what should have already been completed to re-prioritize if necessary. And you can't feasibly do that without an estimation.

The two biggest problems with estimations are underestimating and treating estimations as promises. It's hard to estimate. So the best course of action is to make stories as small as possible. Probably smaller than someone would consider rational. If not, at least have the stories divided into individual tasks or chunks. Then once you have estimations, treat them as goals rather than deadlines. Use your sprint review as a time to honestly reflect on why the estimation was missed. Then, and this is critical to successfully estimating in the future, use the notes of reflection to make better estimates.

[joncp]

> The problem with this is that the stakeholder might not understand what simple means. It happens here all the time.

"Do the simplest thing" means don't overengineer, not necessarily that the feature won't be complex. You only code up what helps fulfill that particular story's definition of "done."

As for complex features. when my stakeholder asks for some big complex change it's almost always decomposable into much simpler stories. Maybe those have to be hidden behind feature flags until the whole epic is done, but they're shippable individually. Doing that decomposition up front helps demonstrate the complexity to the stakeholder and takes some pressure off of me. It also makes them feel secure because they have more granular insight into progress; that they're not sending me off on some Lewis & Clark expedition.