I've worked at a few medium sized organizations and the cognitive dissonance around modern development practices has been astounding. Many claimed to practice 'agile' development. We'd have daily scrums, stand-ups, and kanban boards with tasks broken down and estimates to the hour. Yet it was so obvious the entire process was "waterfall in disguise".
First PMs would write laughably incomplete requirements. Then developers would be asked to create tasks and estimate how many hours it was going to take. Then developers would implement the features and maybe write some half baked test cases, as PMs watched their burndown chart and constantly asked why we're behind schedule. Then the QA department would manually test the product for a couple weeks. After a few cycles of back and forth between QA and the dev team, the performance team would deploy to a staging environment and run their analysis, resulting in a few more back and forth cycles. Finally the devops team would deploy the latest code - at midnight with a bunch of developers present to monitor for unexpected bad outcomes.
I wrote features that didn't get deployed for months and in some cases years. If you find yourself at a place like Pitch, be grateful because shipping every week is a blessing.
criticaltinker 2021-08-19 16:22:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]
First PMs would write laughably incomplete requirements. Then developers would be asked to create tasks and estimate how many hours it was going to take. Then developers would implement the features and maybe write some half baked test cases, as PMs watched their burndown chart and constantly asked why we're behind schedule. Then the QA department would manually test the product for a couple weeks. After a few cycles of back and forth between QA and the dev team, the performance team would deploy to a staging environment and run their analysis, resulting in a few more back and forth cycles. Finally the devops team would deploy the latest code - at midnight with a bunch of developers present to monitor for unexpected bad outcomes.
I wrote features that didn't get deployed for months and in some cases years. If you find yourself at a place like Pitch, be grateful because shipping every week is a blessing.