Their creator has disavowed them. People cannot agree on what a story point even represents. The measure is different for every team that uses it. They sow confusion, create conflict, unreliable timelines, are easily gamed, demotivate and degrade the performance of your team.
For everyone involved, this is a waste of time. Let's deep dive into why Story Points are so broken and how to avoid dealing with them ever again.
The Carolina Code Conference is a welcoming and community-driven “polyglot” conference that’s set to take place in beautiful downtown Greenville, SC on Saturday August 19th, 2023 in the Greenville ONE building. This conference, which returns for the first time since 2019, invites coders of all experience levels to attend, plug into the development community, share their experiences and have a great time as well.
Continuing our series from 2012 where I accidentally ended up combating phishing and fraud for a year, we move onto the spam issue. Everything that happened that year was an exercise in triage. Problems were everywhere on the system and in the marketplace. The site I was working on was the leader in a niche space but it wasn't just the phish who tried to capitalize on the chaos, it was our competitors too.
Spam takes a time investment and every time investment is a business decision. If you can't stop it completely, you can at least dramatically increase their costs...and have fun doing it.
Not a lot of people know this about me, but I've almost exited programming at three different times in my career...because I wanted to get into project management at a high level. Ever since my first project management class in grad school, it just made sense to me...but after about 15 years in software it doesn't anymore. Let me explain how to fix it.
I read an article earlier today called The self-hating Web Developer that I found on Hacker News and it bothered me. It resonated with me as something that I professionally internalized over my career but it bothered me because Joseph encountered personal financial difficulty for both himself and his family due to the struggle. For that reason (and insomnia), I feel compelled to write this as reference to refer to for anybody else who may be struggling with the same thing.
It's been about four years since we last took on a new project as a company. Work continued for existing clients for a long time after that, but the company itself was basically dead from that point. I was on vacation with my family last week and somewhat reflecting on exactly how I got there after ending up in a hospital bed in the middle of the night four years ago trying to keep it going. Here's how it happened.
NOTE: I still personally consult through Brightball.
I got a newsletter last night from Screenhero announcing version 1.0. The problem is that in the announcement, they also announced a change in pricing that will probably kill a lot of what they have going for them. And I hate that. I REALLY hate that. I've worked for companies where we had to invest a lot of time cleaning up bad decisions, so maybe it bothers me a little more. I really like Screenhero though, so I'm going to try to help. I wasn't doing a good job of explaining myself to them via Twitter, so this should hopefully be a better explanation of what I was trying to communicate.
Asking people for payment for work is a touchy subject for everyone involved. We've had the luxury of experimenting a little bit over our first couple of years, and here's what we learned.
When we first started out, we listed the thorough quality assurance review as an optional piece of our estimates. We had this incredibly naive idea that if we gave people the option to save a little money up front that they'd fully understand if there was anything that needed to be tuned up, post-launch. We learned our lesson...hard.