this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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My mentor at my first job was a mid-level dev 10 years younger than me. He was an all-around great and knowledgeable guy. When he'd get asked for an estimate on something without proper details in the ticket, he'd reply that a spike was needed before any kind of estimate, and that's how it would usually proceed.
Sometimes, however, the PM would insist on an immediate estimate. My mentor would then, without hesitation, reply: "8 points" (a full sprint in our company).
"But why that long when you don't know the details?"
"Exactly. Give me a spike to find out, and then it could be less."
None of us other devs contradicted him, junior or senior, because we understood where he was coming from. Needless to say, I learned a lot from him including how not to kill myself so someone else could get a tap on the back.
One time I worked on a team that had a ridiculously high defect rate. Stuff was constantly getting kicked back from QA. Management kept piling on all kinds of convoluted processes to try to reduce the number of defects which only made things worse.
I started really hammering the need for doing a root cause analysis as part of bug/defect tickets. Don't just fix the bug. Make sure you understand what caused it and link the bug ticket to the ticket that caused it.
Big surprise (not really), 90% of the bugs and defects were being caused by like 3 people.
Your comment made me think of some of the PM's whining about adding one story point for doing an RCA because apparently it's better to just ignore the problem and keep pumping out shitty broken code as fast as possible.
Yeah, that scenario sounds awfully familiar to me as well. 😅