

Ask HN: How does your team do project management? Does it work? - cyounkins

Deadlines?
Task management?
Some newfangled methodology?
Status meetings?
How do you estimate completion time beyond trivial projects, especially when requirements change or are not fully defined?
======
skylark
We're doing Agile, but I hesitate to call it Agile because I have nothing
against the original concept and don't want to cast it in a negative light.
The way we're doing it is probably the most dysfunctional system for software
development I could possibly imagine.

Let me set the stage.

I'm working with 100+ other developers and probably 300+ total people on this
one project. We're subdivided into 20 scrum teams of ~5 developers each.

So far so good.

The problem is that I'm working for a non-tech Fortune 25 company. The person
who signs our checks and justified this project is literally six levels of
management above me and reports directly to the CEO. To quantify progress and
justify the cost (hundreds of millions of dollars) our project is treated as
its own organization which has to satisfy a service-level agreement (SLA).
This SLA contains completely arbitrary metrics like velocity, defect count,
and myriad other things which are only tangentially related to software
quality and execution.

This has resulted in the most ridiculous management strategy wherein
everything is locally optimized rather than globally optimized. Here are some
examples:

1\. At the end of every three week sprint, there's a rush to complete stories
because if anything is moved, management looks bad. Software engineering
standards go out the window because there's literally not enough hours in the
day, and nobody is willing to work overtime just to make some manager look
better.

2\. Speaking of poor software engineering standards, there's so much pressure
to close defects immediately that the standard practice is to hotfix/patch
everything rather than solve underlying issues. This has created enormous
amounts of technical debt in our code base, making working on anything you
haven't touched nearly impossible.

3\. We're subjected to completely arbitrary pressure any time we're missing
the metrics in our SLA. We're not in production or even close to it, and yet
our management has had the gall to force six day work weeks across the entire
project so the defect count could be brought down. Our strategy? More
hotfixing/patching and pushing defects off to other teams, because when you're
giving up your Saturday based on some completely imagined emergency, there
isn't much incentive to do things the right way.

The end result? Extremely brittle software which satisfies acceptance criteria
and has a pretty veneer, but will break the moment you sneeze on it. 200
million dollars well spent.

~~~
philipov
"We needed to become more agile, so we lost weight by cutting off our arms and
legs."

