

3 benefits of improving your burn-down charts - epetre
http://blog.in-sight.io/3-benefits-insights-burn-down-chart-adds-to-your-pivotal-tracker-projects/

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lucisferre
Agile stuff like this just reeks of micro-management to me. To add insult to
injury I recall one presenter at an Agile conference a few years ago explain
how they added a "delta" value to their velocity so they could also report on
the rate of change of their rate of change... Funnily enough they stopped
short of just calling it "acceleration". Ugh though.

I have yet to see this type of process and measurement add value or
productivity to a project. But perhaps that's just my experience.

~~~
kabdib
Yeah. My old group at Microsoft started doing "agile" and it just turned into
a micromanagement field day, with PMs and middle management in meetings
examining charts and calling people on the carpet for missing their estimates.

Look, they're _estimates_ . . . often made by other people than the ones doing
the work.

(Oh, and having the build break for two or three weeks running didn't help the
"estimates" very much. A culture of build breaking just rewards the people who
are less careful than others).

I finally got the PM on our project to call our scrum meetings "status
meetings" instead, because that's exactly what they were. Status for rollup
into the Great Burndown Chart.

Over two years out of that garbage and I'm still bitter.

When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it,"
run away, because it's going to suck hard.

~~~
dragonwriter
> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it,"
> run away, because it's going to suck hard.

Agile _means_ doing it your own way. It _means_ customizing what works for the
team and the particular tasks.

 _Scrum_ is a fixed methodology with a rulebook.

(A lot of time "Agile" gets used to mean "Scrum" but the two aren't the same,
or even the same _kind_ of thing, though the Scrum Book is an often not-
unreasonable _starting point_ for an agile organization.)

