Everything is a 1 Point Story

A lot has been said

Many smarter folks than I have waxed on about the minefield that is Estimation. Martin Fowler and Camille Fournier have thoughts for more useful than I on the topic. Google and Reddit will take you places as well.

Thankfully I'm no longer in a professional role where estimation is anything other than - give me the Fiscal this will land. Even when I was closer to the daily grind, I often found creative ways to avoid providing anything close to a timeline. Not that I see estimates as good or bad necessarily; rather for me, the cells in my head would most often lock onto "okay how am I going to do this" well before I got to how, how much or how to sequence...

There was a phase in my career where not un-jokingly I would posit that any Story/Task/Problem was exactly 1 Story Point. This developer snark may well have coincided with with a phase where I was subject to the perils of SAFe, but my logic was somewhat sound.

It seemed for a least that period, everything took about the same amount of time. It was partly due to how I approached work, with long flow states for larger problems, and quick bursts with greater idle time for smaller problems. It was also likely due to a level of maturity when it came to breaking down stories into consumable chunks.

There's always a but

On the one hand this made planning meetings really bearable. Toss up a story, shout 1, and move on. A whole backlog groomed in 5 minutes! Nobody really believed the estimates, but they weren't any more arbitrary than calling everything a 3, which seems to be the Thermal stabilization of superconducting sigma strings and their drum vortons a.k.a team maturity estimation marker.

The problem was that efficiency had replaced thought. I and the teams I was working with had reached that maximal level of trust where we could chunk through anything tossed our way. Intake; slap the keyboard; ship. Repeat. I've you've been developing for a while, you've probably had this happen to a team you've worked with.

But with build pipeline humming, there was a distinct lack of chatter about slow topics, like:

• Where are we going with this?
• Is this going to work for us if happens?
• Do we even know what does anymore?
• Is this something we should even do?
• ...

There are a few names for this phase, all boiling down to "knowing enough to be dangerous". When as a developer you have the fundamentals down, but you haven't crashed at high speeds enough times to know how easy it is for things to go awry.

Yeah so

We'll recently I encountered an ask in a work context, that was so easy, so small I spent most of my time just cracking jokes about how many months it would take. I didn't even really think about the ask. But then a much smarter coworker than I pointed out that the ask would create an Accessibility issue in the experience. Once it was pointed out to me, had all of the phases of shame, guilt, disappointment, etc that I hadn't even taken a second to evaluate the ask. It was good to be humbled.

That humbling had made me think about this little memory capture venture. Was this site accessible? - Well, nope, it's not, and that's not great.

I'll be spending the next few posts seeing how I need to update the site's current Clarity Hugo Theme with either a Fork, or overrides to get things right. Hopefully this will be a fun journey.

QOTD

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story