[latchkey]

Actually, no. It is far less robotic in practice and works quite well because once the schedule is better known and controlled, developers can go home on time every day. The whole crunch mode thing is effectively eliminated.

Pivots get into work at the same time, work together all day and then get to leave at the exact sane normal 8 hour work day. Every single day. Sounds like a great job to me.

[sundayedition]

If a team is great at pointing, and the lead/PM is good at scoping then I tend to agree with this.

I've seen 1 team good enough at pointing to do 2 week Sprints, call their velocity, and generally nail it.

It was a small federal team on a mature (7 year old) coldfusion application with a backlog that mainly involved minor features and bug fixes, where the app had a narrow clear scope.

The startups I've been involved in are too chaotic. When you have a team lead or project manager who never met a feature request they could say "no" or "that's not urgent" too, the problem is even worse. Also when your domain or features are generally not well defined "let's bolt a full CRM onto this now"

Among the chaos, I still go home on time every day.

[latchkey]

The team doesn't have to be great at pointing. That is the whole point of this model. A small story is 1 point for the story and 1 point for testing. Medium is 2 points for coding and 1-3 for testing. Anything else should probably be cut up into smaller stories. The idea is to have more stories... this way the work can be divided up more easily and smaller units of work are easier and more fun to accomplish.

I do agree that the PM has to be excellent at writing stories and the team has to be good at pushing back on the PM to say that a story is too big and to break it up appropriately into smaller stories.

Two week sprints are awful. Nobody should ever be in that. The problem is that the team works for 2 weeks and then after those two weeks, everyone stands up and shows what they did. If you don't hit the mark, then it is another two weeks. Now a single feature can be held up for 4+ weeks! Or even worse, you cut out things like testing to make the 2 week sprint.

The pivotal model of making smaller features and factoring in testing into the pointing ensures that nobody is working alone for 2 weeks without any oversight.

[Redsquare]

20 'points' (whatever they are) last week has zero bearing on what will be accomplished this week, or next or in 6 months time. Vanity metrics. Your silently forcing them to be a feature factory and act in a consistent robotic fashion no matter what the problem at hand is. I bet your tech debt velocity is increasing weekly.

[latchkey]

This is why velocity is a 3 week average of points and can be overridden in the tool to show people who are out on vacation/sick. The tool dynamically updates to show what stories make it into an iteration as well.

The whole idea is not to force people into a box. It is to just give PM's a way to plan the future. Obviously, things can change so it isn't some forceful thing at all.

Don't knock it until you've tried it. I had an opinion like you and then I went and worked in this system and it totally changed my mind.

[trastentrasten]

I tend to agree. I have found the number of stories to have som utility as a metric, though.