This article is extremely weak, pandering to engineers beset by clueless pointy-hair antics, without acknowledging that engineers can suffer from their own blind spots, regardless of whether stakeholders have the technical background to understand it or not.
The elephant in the room is this: a team can not produce good work without both competence and trust in equal measure. An immature engineer may assume a business stakeholder is dumb because they don't understand or engage on technical details, an immature business stakeholder may assume that pressure and threats can yield quality work. In both cases, the immature individuals are putting their energy into counter-productive hand-wringing.
But now here's where it gets hard: trust can't be blind and incompetence exists. The straw man analogy that content of estimates are somehow immutable and unavoidable facts like the weather demonstrates an incredible lack of agency and resourcefulness. We are talking about humans working together to solve problems and build things, we have incredible latitude on how we want to approach things. This viewpoint reeks of learned helplessness. Look at the proposed solutions:
> In these cases, discuss with your stakeholders: why the estimated effort is this much? what part of the story takes the most time? where are the biggest unknowns? In addition, discuss ways to: slice up the story and deliver it in multiple parts, validate each part early, preferably using prototypes
Do you see the assumed constraint? There is no discussion of the problem to be solved or job to be done. Often in these cases you have a non-technical person prescribing a solution that doesn't make sense. If that's the case, it can only be solved by an engineer who has communication skills and credibility to discuss a better approach to the problem. Assuming that a user story passed down to the team is somehow sacrosanct is the type of process-oriented dysfunction that tanks morale and leads to impotent teams.
Oh my god thank you. Software engineering seems to be the only field where it seems like these types of super weird arguments about being too special or unique to follow or apply any business process are common, coupled with a vibe of "we are way smarter than everyone else".
Why are these people surprised that other stakeholders won't just accept a "trust me bro, it's ready when it's ready you just have to go with it" when nothing else works like that in the business world.
The elephant in the room is this: a team can not produce good work without both competence and trust in equal measure. An immature engineer may assume a business stakeholder is dumb because they don't understand or engage on technical details, an immature business stakeholder may assume that pressure and threats can yield quality work. In both cases, the immature individuals are putting their energy into counter-productive hand-wringing.
But now here's where it gets hard: trust can't be blind and incompetence exists. The straw man analogy that content of estimates are somehow immutable and unavoidable facts like the weather demonstrates an incredible lack of agency and resourcefulness. We are talking about humans working together to solve problems and build things, we have incredible latitude on how we want to approach things. This viewpoint reeks of learned helplessness. Look at the proposed solutions:
> In these cases, discuss with your stakeholders: why the estimated effort is this much? what part of the story takes the most time? where are the biggest unknowns? In addition, discuss ways to: slice up the story and deliver it in multiple parts, validate each part early, preferably using prototypes
Do you see the assumed constraint? There is no discussion of the problem to be solved or job to be done. Often in these cases you have a non-technical person prescribing a solution that doesn't make sense. If that's the case, it can only be solved by an engineer who has communication skills and credibility to discuss a better approach to the problem. Assuming that a user story passed down to the team is somehow sacrosanct is the type of process-oriented dysfunction that tanks morale and leads to impotent teams.