I'll start: >grooming meeting >mfw we discuss a task

What the fuck is grooming?

I understand what you're talking about from context and I know what the word means in other contexts, but how the fuck did it find its way into scrums?

Anyway I don't have a particularly entertaining story, just the experience of a boss who wanted to institute this framework and then never held anyone accountable to the process. Then he got upset nothing happened. The upshot to my story is that there are living, breathing human beings out there who literally (the real literally) believe that agile/scrum is magic. I'm so ashamed for our species.

>>60249294

Grooming is just assessing the complexity of tasks in our own point system for later planning of sprints, as you probably assume from the context.

I know what you mean.

For fucks sake, good engineers do good work, shit engineers do shit work, no amount of planning magic is going to change that.

The main thing that managers love about things like agile and groomings/plannings is that they get nice colorful graphs of what the team is doing.

And everyone knows managers have a colorful graph fetish.

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Story time

>doing tasks assigned to me at sprint planning
>finish all my tasks over a week before sprint end
>get in additional 3 tasks into the sprint
complete 2 our of 3
>sprint review/retrospective meeting
>management asking me "what lessons for next sprint can we learn from not finishing this one task"
>whatthefuck.bat
>argue with two managers in the room for good 5 minutes about how it's better to do more work and not fit in arbitrary sprint limits
>"herp derp it makes it harder to plan next sprint"

These people are "managers"...

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>>60249215
>PO thinks grooming is meant to get developers help him write stories
>he expects us to write down all the architectural details as acceptance criteria
>endless discussions ensue because of developers wanting to solve the same issue differently
>backlog is a TL;DR monster with excel sheets, videos, living style guides and gazillions of comments, client joins in asking his retarded questions
>ignore tickets for two days and just do my actual work
>PO invites me to a personal meeting to tell me to be more sociable

Fuck this world I just want to develop shit.

>>60249456

>argue with two managers in the room for good 5 minutes about how it's better to do more work and not fit in arbitrary sprint limits

the reason for this is because they are billing the company for sitting in their office reading clickbait articles for the duration of the project. any time someone finishes work faster, that is less time that the project will need to be billed for and therefore less free money they get for occupying space in the building

>>60249488

Be the change that you want to see.

A proper task looks like this:

## Story
`Why do you need the thing and what is the problem you are trying to solve with the thing?`

## Acceptance Criteria
`List of requirements which need to be fulfilled in order to consider the task complete. No technical explanations, just requirements.`

## Progress Summary
#### DONE
#### TODO
`This is for the engineer to use to track progress`

This is how all tasks should look like. If the acceptance criteria are not clear so that the team can asses the complexity the task needs to be sent back to the stake holder for review and editing.

Possible technical solutions CAN be mentioned during grooming but only to asses complexity, not to solve the problem there and then.

Specific implementation is up to the engineer that takes the task.

>>60249551

We are not contractors, we are all employees of the company.

This is the shit why I learned a skill and work as an electrician now. Do my job and be done with it not listening retarded managers.

>>60249593

so you don't do any hour allocation/billing at all?

wow that must be nice

>>60249570
We have tasks like this on my current project:
>no explanation at all
>10+ complex and vague features as the acceptance criteria, described by buzzwords
>screenshots from the design guy

It's not my job to do anything with the tickets, apart from assigning it to the client when it's ready to be tested. I have a PO who does nothing else than write tickets and bug me about the progress all day.

>>60249630

NOPE.

It has it's pros and cons.

>>60249617

I kinda envy you. I do enjoy the complex things I build, but I do not enjoy the managerial masturbation and cock waving.

>>60249707

That's nonsense. You can definitely influence the process.

A task that cannot be reasonably expected to be done in one week of work should be split into multiple tasks. Two weeks is absolute maximum.

Refuse to groom too complex tasks. Demand for them to be split along functional lines.

Don't bundle together unrelated features, this way you can parallelize work more effectively.

>>60249215
Scrum is no replacement for a good manager and I wish people would see that. I wish places would spend more time teaching managers to manage, and then giving them scrum as a framework to build on, rather
than giving shit managers scrum as a tool to be rigid with.

I've only worked for a small firm using scrum for a few months, so I'm no expert. What I could see was that the managers were crap, pressured devs into trying to squeeze large tasks into smaller time windows, complaining said agreement wasn't met, then complaining that the devs work was full of bugs, consuming more time then if it were done correctly the first time.

I just wish there was a framework to allow people to emulate common sense.

>>60250629

The thing is, it's much harder and much more costly to replace a shit manager than it is to replace a shit developer.

Managers might not have some skills, but they have the understanding of inner workings of the company they work for which make them effective on higher level task management.

It's kinda like with sysadmins. It's hard to replace a sysadmin because a sysadmin knows your whole infrastructure, and teaching that to a new hire will take years.

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can you skip the whole agile circlejerk if you are an analyst?