[ChuckNorris89]

Yeah, I also see this issue. It's made worse by Agile/Scrum that assumes during the planning poker meeting that every dev has 8 hours per day available of constant flow while the real value being maybe 5-6 if you're lucky so you end up cutting corners or burned out due to the stress of meeting the target velocity.

[matwood]

> planning poker meeting that every dev has 8 hours

You shouldn't be talking about hours at all. Points and team velocity help to account for all the overhead in a sprint. Once a team has a consistent velocity, they can talk about items in retro to speed up that velocity (drop a meeting, etc...).

I once had a manager who tried to break tasks down into 15 minute increments. There was a task that he argued was a 15 minute task. And yes, he was right assuming my computer was open, the right editor was up, the right project was pulled and up to date, the project was properly building, there were no updates to apply, and the list goes on.

Hours is just a bad way to plan. Unfortunately those who bill by hour are forced to plan that way.

[dtech]

Your planning system is bad. This was the original origin of using story points instead of days, because the designers of extreme programming found that the work of 1 "ideal day" (8 hours of uninterrupted productive coding) could be done in about 3 days.

And don't get me started on measuring velocity, especially across teams. Your environment sounds like its poisoned by middle management.

[ChuckNorris89]

It's not my planning system but it was broken indeed even though they brought in a licensed scrum master as a consultant but he was more interested in running things the way middle managers wanted it as that guaranteed his job security.

Anyway, thank God I left, but from what I hear from other mates in the industry it's not better in other companies in my area since they're all run by middle managers.

Maybe it's a problem specific to Germany where managers are always right and their authority is unquestionable.

[majewsky]

That's not specific to Germany. Middle managers are politicians inside a company. Their ultimate goal is almost always to accumulate power.

[cassianoleal]

Agree. From the agile manifesto's principles [0]:

> Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

> Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

If either of these requirements are not met, you're not being agile.

[0] https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

[Lewton]

Not an inherent agile/scrum problem, we assume 6 hours availability per day during planning in my team

[Chris2048]

We assume 4 hrs, that not only accounts for meetings, breaks etc, but also allows people time to help each other with unscheduled support/help/discussion.

[JulianMorrison]

Which is still about 3 more than reality