Ah yes the forgotten land of uncompleted tasks. Slated to be a hotfix when it becomes a problem.
Yet the solution is so simple. Let the them spend 20 – 35 % of their paid time on backlog. Let them refactor the architecture. Let them improve the code base. You know, that thing the Lean book talks about, the part that everyone overlooks, the part so critical yet so often overlooked that others wrote books that ride that one aspect home. Oh, unless you want them to spend overtime on a production problem whose root cause a scrum master added to the backlog 5 years prior to the incident, of course. Oh, unless you want them to give you one year estimates for changes as simple as translation changes 'cause the architecture is so ass-backwards and never improved upon that everything depends on everything and everything breaks with one simple change. And who needs tests, right? Waste of time and money! Just live in fear that one change can break the entire software, like a real man.
“I archived them all Padme. They’re gone…every single one of them. And not just the minor tickets.”
But the stories and epics too
Everywhere I’ve ever been,
If it’s lower than “High” or “2”, it’s as good as “backlog” :)
(There can never be a priority “1” and seldom “Highest”, never “Blocker”, otherwise the CEO gets a text or something.)
Scrum Master: “Do we really have to make it a blocker?”
Me: “Uh yeah. It’s blocking these three other tasks.”
Scrum Master: “But is it really?”
Me: “Yes.”
Scrum Master: “Let’s just leave it on in development and we can review the progress tomorrow.”
Me: “That’s what you said yesterday.”
Scrum Master: “Alright guys. I’m going to give you back five minutes of your time today.”
Don’t forget breaking everything up into ever-smaller tasks just so that something, anything, can be closed every day. 😂 Because the process matters, not the work.
Holy shit that’s too real. I come here to get away from work!
At every company I’ve worked at there were basically 3 priority levels - normal, stuff the client says is urgent, and the stuff that’s actually urgent. “We’ll fix it later” is basically for the week in December that everyone’s on vacation and the juniors have nothing to do.
Lol, I love that week. Feels so productive working on low priority shit that’s been around forever
Refactoring that parser you did for the internal DSL in 2011.
Honestly why do jr devs want to do work so bad, I’m literally just like “yo chill” and they keep pestering me for work
They probably spent a year looking for a job and they’re suffering from imposter syndrome so they feel like if they aren’t constantly getting stuff done they might be fired, plus they haven’t worked enough to hit burnout and don’t know how to pace themselves.
This
My longest lived backlog task is 3 years old
We let a bot close our backlogs after 60 days of inactivity. It has a valuable “get it done or let it go” effect.
Those are rookie numbers!
