Developers are a very big part of the process and because they’re such an important cog, we would want them to be happy. We don’t want them to just give their work without having any say, or feeling like they’re nothing more than just robots putting out work. They’re an integral part of the system and it’s important that they voice their opinions.
I have talked with a lot of developers about ways to make SCRUM more developer friendly. One of the things that they asked was that they get more communication from the top down. A lot of times there isn’t a lot of information given to them as to why some parts of the process are more important than others and why some stories are more important than others.
Very often we ask them to pivot their attention from one story to another, because of the priorities, but they have no idea why. If someone hears 30 hours for a user story, then they take it literally, and think ‘by next Monday’ it will be complete, which would not be accurate. Story points are whenever we’re estimating hours, but they’re an estimate and they should not be taken literally.
The point of a user story is that we’re sitting down with the user and we’re asking them – ‘In your daily job, in order to make this software work, what do you do and what do you need it to do?’. The developers ask that we actually talk to the users and find out what they need, instead of reading a technical document. and then deciding from there, based on the architecture, what we think a user will need.
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