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JawnV6 posted:I thought this was the non-horrific thread That's basically what we do at my current (read: not-quite-let-go-at) job. Is this not the best way to deploy to multiple servers? What's the most accepted way of doing so these days?
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Nov 30, 2015 15:46
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My team at the new job has literally never done anything related to project management methodologies, ever. We've had 12+ hours worth of meetings already and we haven't even got the data model down on our new project. I'm being looked to as the major driving force for change re: "being more Agile" and bringing the whole approach to the team. I have like a year of dev experience at most. We have a QA department that we don't seem to interact with much, if at all. Everything in the project seems to be headed towards a waterfall approach, and most of the company's infrastructure is incompatible with OSX, which all the devs use and literally no one else. We can't build Docker containers locally because the company's VPN blocks downloading stuff from the Debian mirror servers. gently caress it, I'll kick rear end anyway. Bring it on 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 08:00
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No but seriously, I would really like some advice on getting middle management at a dinosaur of a company on board with agile. The team isn't much of a problem - it's only two or three of us - but I can't help but worry that our product owner/manager dude is totally ignoring the concept of "working with the customer", and a lot of assumptions are being made. We've already got wireframes, which is fine, but those need to be translated into a prototype or we won't be able to tell if we're going in the right direction or not.  All I know is that I gotta push for change, and the company seems to be willing, cause they're being threatened by newer companies who are in a prime position to take their share of the market, and they hate that, so they're looking for a way to get their edge back.
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Jan 24, 2016 08:19
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Thanks, guys. That's been my experience with agile as well. As soon as you start trying to deviate from the prescribed methods in the books, things start to fall apart, and I'm pretty sure that almost no company sticks to agile 100%. I'm torn between implementing it as strictly as possible, and simply taking the short iteration loops/prioritization/anti-waterfall concepts from the methodology. I'm not gonna try going cowboy. That's a recipe for disaster. Not communicating with the customer/user on the product you're making means you'll go off the rails very quickly and won't make something particularly great. And I've got nowhere near enough clout to manage upwards, but I do have the ability to push for better practices. My work is certainly cut out for me. It's definitely not like I'm an agile expert brought on to revolutionize the workspace, nooo gently caress that. But I do legitimately want to improve our project methodology because it's very easy for a project here to go totally off the rails. Also the company has a history of bringing on vendors, contractors and proprietary software for a few months then subsequently dumping them and pushing the results off onto developers  The good thing is that iterative prototyping is totally possible since people at the workplace go loving gaga for meetings, so I'm free to show our current software to the customer every sprint end! I think.
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Jan 24, 2016 16:34
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I like Kanban a lot, actually. I'm wishing I could work it in to our project approaches, but it'll need a PM who understands how to properly prioritize tasks instead of just adding new features on the top of the stack every day. We're about 3-4 weeks into our new project, which came out of a proposed feature for an existing one, and we've had like three sprint meetings where we ended up giving out absolutely no work. Since the PM wants this project to be priority over another pre-existing one, we're not touching that, but we don't have tickets for the current one outside of "we need to figure out our data model and make a confluence homepage". So I just spend my time reading books from PragProg, which is still productive.
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Jan 24, 2016 22:41
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Well, the first thing that springs to mind is code reviews so that people's code quality is up to snuff, but that doesn't solve the code janitor problem. I think a better way is to employ pair programming so that the bad code never exists in the first place, but then the dev time is split between multiple tasks, which seems antithetical to common adages regarding focus. There are a few things that I'm critical of in agile, and that's one of them. It seems to assume a low delta of skill among the team members, which is rarely the case. I'm not sure how to address the problem, but pair programming is at least beneficial and collaborative. v  v
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Jan 25, 2016 14:53
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Basically, just don't be a bureaucracy.
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Jan 25, 2016 18:33
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I'm a little worried about my current workplace's project methodology. We had a...spring planning-like-thing today for deciding what to do about our new project that spun out of an existing one. Here's a few things I heard and learned in the ~2hrs of meeting time:
 I was told by another engineer a few days back that part of the reason I was brought on was to help drive the team closer to agile and to improve our process. I genuinely don't know if I can do this all myself. I'm still learning the basics of agile and even though I'm reading as fast as I can about creating user stories and making tight iteration loops, I still am not the Expert Team Fixer they clearly need. I'm torn between scrambling to save this project, or just sitting back and letting it go off the rails, distancing myself from worry. I feel too bad doing the latter, but I don't know if I can take on the responsibility of the former.
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Jan 26, 2016 19:04
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:One thing that can really gently caress up a project is having too many people on it when it starts. It sounds like you have too many people on the project. What's funny is that there's only about 4 of us in the immediate vicinity, but there's still like 12+ stakeholders Elsewhere and that one UI/UX team that I have never seen before. It's hard to get a handle on who is involved in this project, due to the sheer size of the company. I'm probably overthinking this. I'm just gonna watch how this goes for the first bit, and work on learning about agile and all that over time. Sarcasmatron posted:There seems to be some conflation of Agile and Scrum. This is good poo poo. There's a lot I don't know about the entire process, and I'm still not sure if the Agile I experienced at my last company was quite the kind of methodology I want to be a part of. Right now, I'm just reading The Agile Samurai, and so far it makes a lot of sense - but I don't think it's the be-all-end-all of it. I'm not sure what else I should be reading and learning to help figure out the team's methodology/improvement. I just want to be able to share real insights and get things on track when we spend 45 minutes arguing about fields on a data model 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 11:24
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If you're stoked to do that and genuinely believe that it's important, then you'll be fine.
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Feb 1, 2016 06:13
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One of the new projects I'm on has everyone estimate their tickets hour-by-hour during each team's sub-sprint planning. Neither me nor the other developer I'm pairing with have any loving clue how to do this or why, so we just plan the sum total of the tickets' hours to be (2 weeks/sprint * 40 hrs/week * 2 people per ticket) = 160hrs. Ostensibly, the upper management sprint leaders want to see burndown charts as close to the model as possible, and have been blowing their stack up until now over the charts looking like square waves, so everyone just adjusts the hours taken every afternoon by some arbitrary degree. The good thing is that nothing really happens aside from upper management getting mad and being ineffectual, so it doesn't matter outside of the numbers affecting your bonuses, performance reviews, and continued employment, but that'll never be a problem because the industry and company is robust and will survive forever hahaha *layoffs*
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 13:41
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Ithaqua posted:This is awful and wrong. Do either of you go to meetings? Do you use the bathroom? Do you take breaks? I was told that was more or less what the project managers expected in term of hours logging.  It's not how I would do it at all, but I've given up on fighting it - I can't help them change their behavior by myself, especially since the company is a glacier of a dinosaur w/r/t project management policy. They have to be the ones to change, and they won't change within the decade.I can say so much more about this company and its weirdass practices, but I've given out enough identifying information as is.
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Mar 9, 2016 00:17
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I think they're idiots too. They also are wayyy over my head and about 1.5-2 hours away by car at the main corporate office, and the company's culture basically hasn't changed since 1920. There's nothing I can do about it. I certainly push back when I get the chance - lord knows I'll talk someone's ear off about how badly they're doing things - but I don't assume I'll get anywhere, and I kind of want to keep my job so I don't wanna piss them off. I'm really, really unhappy with how we scoped our work for this sprint. Especially since the majority of it requires research via meetings with the individual product owners, most of which are like "can we schedule a meeting for <three days later>?" and then postpone it for another two. So, it's not just badly estimated - most of that time estimate is downtime because MEETINGS. I'm spending my time on self-education as a way to offset that, and so I don't seem like I'm slacking. Let's not make this into the Pollyanna Power Hour again. Point is after this sprint, I'm gonna ream them on their awful process. Also the day of every sprint planning we have a 3-hour demo meeting at 9:30 where the product owners (not developers) demo the stuff that happened this sprint. Isn't that fuckin' crazy?
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Mar 9, 2016 16:33
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It's also impossible to, for example, estimate integrating systems into other systems that 1. you aren't allowed access to and 2. don't know the details of. Especially when they're like "this shouldn't take you more than one sprint" and subsequently cockblock you on meetings and security access grants and poo poo. Developers need agency and power in order to just loving get things done.
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Mar 9, 2016 20:47
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HardDisk posted:You are probably trying to make the point "lol, entitled shits", but not understanding why a process is there is a valid complaint. I just take the mounds of process as a reason to try and be less pressured and hurried. If it's gonna take a while, I might as well let my blood pressure benefit from it.
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Mar 10, 2016 15:09
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There is no perfect Agile process because everything changes to suit your needs and has to do so, also assuming that Agile is silly and ridiculous actually helps you work better in it IME.
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Mar 10, 2016 23:20
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I was gonna bring in cupcakes on my birthday in 2014, but forgot to bring them, and I felt a little bad for not sharing them with my workmates. Then I got fired, and then I ate all of them when I got back home. Anyway yeah I got fired on my birthday too and it sucks.
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Apr 1, 2016 01:34
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On the other hand I was only there for like two months and the company folded a month afterwards so
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Apr 1, 2016 01:35
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If the company has been around for long enough, expect some COBOL and mainframes, too.
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Apr 10, 2016 20:14
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Sprint points for promotions, oh my god 
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Apr 13, 2016 02:24
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Our company has a home-baked version of LEAN/Six Sigma that nobody really understands but that everyone at corporate has to stick to. I have no idea how it works and don't care to find out.
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May 7, 2016 00:38
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We use Lync at work and we're not allowed to use Gmail or other Google products to communicate because "it's insecure", so instead we rely on Outlook and lovely Skype. This company has a lot of awful policies, and I've only scratched the surface, but thankfully I don't have to deal with most of them as a developer.
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May 14, 2016 17:14
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I'm working on a project for the marketing division at work in an internal contractor-like setup. Meaning, I have demos and requirements meetings with my contact in marketing, and I work on the application on my own (work) time. I've learned that I am completely miserable at managing a project on my own, both for requirements and for time The project is not at the level of completeness I had hoped for by the next demo (tomorrow), there's no wiki or project page or anything, and I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm worried for the long term health of this project, even with it being relatively small. Is this just due to inexperience/me being an rear end in a top hat, or is there some particular way I should be approaching a project like this? Is this what I would use some form of agile project management methodology for?
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Jun 5, 2016 18:24
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necrobobsledder posted:Depending upon the resources available to you it might be a "let's see how well this person can scrounge together crap in this hellhole of a workplace" hazing scenario or people simply expect you to speak up and it's more passive-aggressive culture that's pervading. I'm more familiar with the former as an excuse for management to basically not do anything except bureaucratic busywork that consumes their lives instead of oh... managing people and processes, but I just suck it up and learned to talk to the right people and to get to the right resources to help me make a non-catastrophic project. I've heard of several projects where people tried to speak up for months or even years while they had meetings to figure out what they should be doing when they have zero access to anything, and it's hard to say if that kind of complicated bureaucracy is the fundamental problem without more info. Sorry, I may have misrepresented the situation. I was contacted by marketing to put together an application for them, and I'm the only one involved - I'm the one expected to handle project management and the like, I'm realizing now. I'm not reporting to anyone except my (in-company) client. And I don't think there's hazing going on, it's not that kind of culture.
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Jun 5, 2016 19:36
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necrobobsledder posted:So you need to set expectations and requirements and ask the right questions before writing a single line of code or asking for a single account. Start with the basic technicals, work up to broader questions or concepts, and ask those questions to your stakeholders. Urgency, timeline, and impact of the project are good starters to clarify at least and it'll tell you if you're being thrown under the bus right away if whoever you're working with is somewhat honest. If you're alone, I'd venture to say that you are almost certainly looking at taking existing software and hacking it up and customizing somewhat as your project because actually coding it while doing management BS is something that I've almost never seen anyone do without working 70+ hour weeks for the duration of a project. I am working with the client to get basic requirements on what the users will want, and trying to present weekly demos of the currently existing product (which is disappointingly little so far). I'm used to working under a project manager and having someone else tell me what I need to get done, so doing this all alone (especially from scratch) is pretty daunting. Do you mean to say that this is a bad position to be in? Regardless, I may have bitten off more than I can chew, especially since I'm doing this in a framework I'm new to and that is in a different paradigm than Rails. 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 22:12
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rt4 posted:Read the Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell This book looks pretty good. I'll pick it up. I just hope I don't have to rely on it more than once...
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Jun 6, 2016 02:19
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Volmarias posted:You could also tell your stakeholders that you don't have anything interesting to demo yet this week, but if they'd like to see the hello world page on your whatever as you begin working to come on by, and that future weeks will be a lot more useful. Isn't a demo supposed to showcase a fully working product, though? I knew I wouldn't have a fully working product in a week, obviously, but it kinda goes against the "prototype like crazy" mantra.
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Jun 6, 2016 13:06
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Malcolm XML posted:Inexperience Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyy I mean, it's not awful, but it's not my favorite setup. I'll just try as hard as I can for this part.
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Jun 7, 2016 12:38
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That sounds a lot like a demotion, man. One situation that terrifies me to think about is being offered to move up to management, and when you decline the offer, they say "ok well you're fired then". It feels like something like that would happen.
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Jun 19, 2016 15:59
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All I know is that if management is anything like how I'm doing project management for the app I'm a single dev on, then absolutely nobody would be happy with me being in management. Least of all myself. God, I'm loving awful at this.
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Jun 20, 2016 17:02
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I still have no idea how to tell whether a manager is good or bad. My experiences with bosses and managers have generally been negative, though.
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Jun 20, 2016 21:59
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Dramamine makes you extremely sleepy, I've learned. I've also realized that the grand majority of the issues and problems I face in my software engineering career come not from software itself, but from the people involved. I can't write a program to tell the VP that we should fix technical debt before shoving more features down users' throats, I can't write a program to justify an expensive solution which already has a cheaper and more useful alternative available, and I can't write a program to give our team good project management and product direction. The code itself is the least worst part of my job, the people are easily the hardest and the worst. I don't want to do project management or product development, not at all, and I'm balls at working with people - but even I can see that these are the weakest links in software development these days. The worst part of computers isn't the computers themselves, but the people using them.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:46
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ratbert90 posted:Web programmers. I'm so sorry.
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Jun 29, 2016 14:31
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It kinda seems like most products that companies (startups, corporations, the whole gamut) need pretty much just boil down to REST-y CRUD apps. For customer-facing services, anyway. A lot of the interesting problems are either already solved via plugins and gems, or require some crazy Ph.D level work to solve. It feels like the technology is becoming less and less the actual barrier to productivity and success, and design is becoming more and more important as those barriers are coming down. Which kinda makes me wonder where software engineers will be going in the future.
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Jul 2, 2016 18:30
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Wanted: Pie-in-CEO-face Thrower
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Jul 5, 2016 21:34
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My project has foregone writing tests in lieu of shoving more and more features into the app and it's just getting harder and harder to support over time. They actually wanna go to market with this poo poo  I will die before my name is associated with a product that has SQL written inline in HTML.
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Jul 7, 2016 14:34
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As part of an ERB template, I mean. Not insecure, but still stupid. It's bad, but not THAT bad. I think.
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Jul 7, 2016 14:51
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Our app just needs an overhaul. It relies on weird Rails form-and-partial-driven stuff for the UI. It would benefit immensely from a front-end framework to handle application state and fancy pants features that are horribly fragile when you try and do it via jQuery on initialization. I can't even elucidate very well exactly what is wrong with it. It's just overall crap and it won't be getting better anytime soon. Improving it would require herculean effort and I just don't have the capacity to put that in, the problems just extend everywhere.
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Jul 7, 2016 16:35
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Knowing when and where to draw the line is basically the holy grail of software development. I'm not surprised that they don't know how to do it.
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Jul 14, 2016 03:17
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We had a discussion yesterday afternoon on what to do about one of the engineers on our team. Specifically, that he's totally useless and slowing us down. He's the type of person that can't really do anything without being babied through it, even though he's supposedly a specialist in the type of work he's doing (CSS, Javascript, etc.) He tends to introduce more bugs than he fixes, has been taking my coworker aside all day whenever he's working on something, and isn't very rigorous about making sure his poo poo works. I don't want to promote a silo culture of "please stop talking to me", and it's perfectly fine to ask questions - it's just that he doesn't have enough experience to figure things out on his own, especially not any basic poo poo like git or Rails. The rest of the team wants him out, and I feel a little bad saying that I'm neutral on him staying or not - he doesn't really bother me even if he sucks at his job. This isn't the first time he's had trouble on a project either, he's been taken off a previous one for the subject being way out of his league/competence. One thing that did bother me a little bit about the discussion was that his personal interests and personal projects were used as ammunition against him. One engineer brought up his mentioning of his self-developed apps and projects as an example of how he doesn't care about the work he's doing and only focuses on what he wants to do. That worries me - this is the kind of red flag that people talk about but no one has actually encountered, where personal interests and development are instead taken as "you aren't doing your work so gently caress you". Is it actually such a bad thing to have personal projects like those? It makes much less likely to talk about my own stuff with my colleagues from now on. Regardless, we're probably going to be losing an engineer soon. On the plus side, a whole bunch of suits showed up yesterday to have a presentation/meeting on how to transform the digital development team, so everything's totally on the up and up, right? we're totally all gonna be let go lmao
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Jul 20, 2016 13:50
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