This is my biggest complaint about SCRUM / Agile programming. With the product owner always calling the shots, rarely will technical debt, foundational improvements and developer productivity make it into the sprint when an MBA-type is deciding where the effort should be “best” spent. So long Refactorman, maybe you’ll get to come out and save us when Agile becomes a fad or incorporates developers into steering the actual development.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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always calling the shots
I'm happy to report that it's not always that way. In my current team, the shots are called by our project manager. The project manager is a comp sci type, not an MBA type. They previously worked as a software engineer for a decade or so before being promoted to project manager. They even take some of the technical debt stories (and other quick low point stories) themselves when they're free.
One of our senior devs thought of a more automated way to implement one of our existing working processes and the project manager let him work on rewriting that for over two sprints.
Promoted to project manager. The stuff of nightmares
I'm pretty sure he had to ask for that to get it. But yeah, unconsensual promotion to any managerial role would be a nightmare to me.
He just like me fr
(I have recently been tasked with updating some pretty important, "legacy" code. I knew I was looking at upwards of a full day of work after ripping out the tangled mess of technical debt that relied on this code just to get the damn thing to compile again, but it was still painful. And I'm only like halfway there now that I'm done with this step)
NGL though, it felt great looking at my diff of the main source file for this code and see it melted from 750+ lines of wrappers and boilerplate bullshit to 250 lines of almost minimalistic, mostly self documented code that achieves the same things as the old one and more, but better.