Docker Compose brought “works on my machine” to the cloud.

That’s a great way to handle it.

I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.

When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.

If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)

I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.

They worked well for us

Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.

After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.

The outcomes weren’t noticably different, so now we just don’t spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.

My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn’t want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.

So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.

The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.

Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.

Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.

Sources:

• Story Points Don’t Work
• No Estimates - An Introduction

It’s actually not a crime to mercy kill and dispose of the body of anyone who says “Well, it’s a simple task. Are you having difficulty?”.

It’s an obscure and weirdly specific law.

(This is a joke, of course.)

There’s gotta be less cruel ways to rehabilitate people, though.

I’m kidding. Welcome reformed convicts, to the wonderful and awful world of coding!