Comments for Marcin Floryan

Comment on Hours of remaining effort by Nader Talai

Nader Talai — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:58:00 +0000

Agree with story points being better for the Y-axis.

If you break down your stories and say every stories is less than two days you can even have story count on the Y-axis. Which works and also forces you to break down the stories so you can see how you are progressing towards your sprint goal.

Comment on Hours of remaining effort by Ben Mathews

Ben Mathews — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:34:11 +0000

Funnily enough, one of my teams is moving to only reporting points burndown. Our motivation comes from a desire to do task creation when we’re ready to start the story rather than upfront in a planning session, meaning ideal hours isn’t even known at the start of the sprint.

Comment on Job Description by Job descriptions

Job descriptions — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:57:28 +0000

I think you are right..Practice makes man perfect. you explain very well all the concepts of job descriptions.

Comment on The years of experiece fallacy by Marcin

Marcin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:48:03 +0000

Thanks for your comment Jon. I will try to clarify my thinking. Firstly my intention was not to brush experience aside altogether. I recognise its value and I do think it is an essential element to becoming competent, excellent and expert developer. Yes, Picasso’s final works evolved far from where he started.
I do however, want to brush aside the particular view of experience that I often see when people set out to recruit developers. That is to assume that the longer you have used a particular set of APIs the better a developer you are in general and to use it as the *only* indicator. Also – on the flip side of that – if you have not used a particular technology for at least an arbitrary length of time you can’t possibly do a good job using it. I have met developers who used ASP.NET for 5 years and ultimately, software they created was worse than that created by others who only used it for a few months.
The reason I mention speed of writing code in this context is because I think it is the only aspect that may correlate directly with the length of time you used a particular API. Writing good software is about much more than knowing what methods there are on the set of classes you have available. If I employ someone to write LINQ statements and they have never done it before it will take them more time to write even the basic ones compared to someone who have more experience using LINQ. Will the latter create better software – I can’t possibly tell, not based on this one aspect only.
Finally, I increasingly like Kevlin’s argument that we don;t learn from failure – if you have failed with a particular technology more times it does not make you any more likely to succeed with it than someone who have never failed using it (though there are other aspects that may help you be successful but it’s not the failure itself).

Comment on The years of experiece fallacy by Jon Skeet

Jon Skeet — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:37:55 +0000

This looks like a non-sequitur to me. Where does typing faster come into it? I think it *does* make a difference how much experience you’ve got with a particular technology – you’re more likely to have been burned by the various things that can go wrong, and know how to avoid them in the future.

Obviously it’s far from the only important thing, and I’d rather work with a good developer who can learn a new platform quickly than a bad one who happens to have a lot of experience in the one I’m interested in right now, but I think it’s a mistake to brush experience aside quite as thoroughly as you’re doing here. There’s a lot more to experience than typing speed. Do you think Picasso’s final work wasn’t influenced by the ones from the rest of his life? Was his first ever painting as good as his last?