I'm bogged down with trying to convert small change requests into feature/user stories.

@KitZ.Fox There is a large investment up-front into the user stories, yes, but that's the nature of making a switch like this, right?

@Ampt Nice.

@KitZ.Fox change requests are coming in to you?

@JimmyHoffa Yes.

Why do you need to convert a change request to a user story?

I'm thinking I might request that we add change requests into the new system, just so I can manage the workflow on my end more easily.

as a product owner, it's really your job to generate that stuff, why are you being given change requests? Who is giving them to you?

@JimmyHoffa Business gives them to me.

change request == user story, of which a product owner is supposed to be creating

Well, according to the project lead, change request == feature.

@KitZ.Fox well according to the project lead, that's stupid and he should be ashamed.

@KitZ.Fox halfarsedagilemanifesto.org

@KitZ.Fox That's not true at all.

A change request could be a new feature. Or it could be a modification to an existing feature.

@JimmyHoffa That sounds about right.

@ThomasOwens That's why I'm thinking that I should have change requests back. It is easier for me to monitor what is coming in that way, and I can think through whether it ought to be a feature or a user story that way, etc.

No one else needs to use them. It would be so that I can manage this queue without losing my train of thought.

@KitZ.Fox the reality is that in Agile, there shouldn't be change requests because they should be replaced with User Stories. You don't go from one to the other, you have one or the other

Right, but I can't sit down and write a user story just like that. I need to be able to put things in queue so I can talk them through later.

@JimmyHoffa I don't agree with that. A user doesn't write a user story.

people over process: Do not have the customer just sending you a document dictating what is to be did. You need to go sit down with them - waste their time - and get out of them exactly what they want and why they want it constructing the user stories with them.

Although I also think that binding yourself to user stories is also a bad idea.

^^^

At the end of the day, you should be dealing with "work items" (or something equally generic). Does it matter if it's a user story, a change request to an existing feature, a new feature request, a bug report, or so on?

The Product Owner prioritizes every work item and the team estimates it.

@ThomasOwens quit being so un-agile.

The form a requirement is written isn't super important. I think User Stories are a neat idea and neat concept, but the most important piece of the whole puzzle I believe is true and proper requirements gathering. Companies the industry over have stopped doing that because the business people who's time it takes to have reqs gathered from them have too big of egos and too much clout and just proclaim their time too valuable to be used by the pithy serfs doing their bidding

You're really slowing down the sprint with talk like that.

@Ampt I'd argue that I'm being more agile by not requiring my requirements to be in a specific form.

@ThomasOwens Right. That's what I'm thinking.

@JimmyHoffa it also takes time to do right, because the person gathering the requirements has to have a good enough understanding of the process to get the user needs, not their proposed solution

@ThomasOwens Excuse me, I'm not sure if you know this, but I'm an Agile Consultant, which pretty much makes me the sheriff of this little watering hole.

I'm not paid the big bucks to not be agile

Also I'm thinking that I'm a really good BA and I don't want my methods to be dictated to me.

Comprende?

If you can't take the people who use/want use out of a product (or the marketing people who know what a product that will sell sell sell should do) in the same room with the person who's going to create it, and have them speak genuinely and casually in detail about what is and is not wanted... Well, you've already failed.

@Ampt Well, I'm my site's software process engineer, so you can take your agile consultancy and put it somewhere. :P

@ThomasOwens Now don't make me call the Agile Inquisition on you. It'd be a shame if something drastic were to happen to your process.

@Ampt QUIET WHILE I LEAN OUT MY PROCESSES.

@enderland that's my entire point: There should be no proposed solution. Not ever. There should be people who want to do something and people who know how to create products (actually create them, not create process that may or may not create products) and when you get them together - when the devs know how to do real requirements gathering, it Just Fuckin' Works.

@ThomasOwens Draws his post-it note pad What'd you say to me?

Providing good solutions is damn easy when you can sit the person who wants the solution and will use it down and just do classical interview style requirements gathering.

I will ticket your arse back to the east coast where you belong if you don't start labeling your items as user stories, ya hear?!

@Ampt I said...I'm. Leaning. Out. My. Processes.

@ThomasOwens Starts flinging half written post it notes around the office

and paper airplanes

30 Minutes Later

> You get a post-it! And you get a post-it! Everybody get's a post-it!

I declare this place... Scrumified.

the proper term is, Scrummy.

it's like rummy but drunkier.

@JimmyHoffa hahaha, devs gathering requirements and understanding business needs. That's a very good joke. I'm going to share that right now.

@JimmyHoffa this is why, imo, the best BA are people who have a technical background

aww.. I was gonna do one last edit.

I have a background in development, data modeling, and scientific research. There is no one here more qualified to gather requirements than I am.

@KitZ.Fox Lifts hat off of face Excuse me partner?

And I am annoyed that I'm having process dictated to me.

@Ampt "Here" meaning "at my institution".

People Helped Today: -2

Our developers have no people skills, no research skills, and completely the wrong attitude for dealing with business.

I wish there was a fine print markup

@KitZ.Fox So you're saying that you're... good with people?

@KitZ.Fox yeah, that's the problem with why most BA's have no dev background

So yeah, I'm more than a little bothered about the attitude that BAs are unnecessary fluff for the development process.

@KitZ.Fox We here do not actually feel that way :) Just like to push your buttons.

Oh.

OK.

except bad BAs are worse than fluff. So that's a catch 22 :(

why can't we only have competent people in the world

Also, you're doing a little different work that what most of us have experienced as a typical BA

you're more project management/client management type deal. You actually know the product and all that.

I sat in a requirements meeting with a dev when I first started here, and he told the business that "it can't be a button because it's a hyperlink" and he actually scoffed and rolled his eyes at them.

I've worked in situations where the BA has no clue what the end product is, or what dev is doing, but you have to go through them to get reqs. it's a mess.

As I was interjecting with "What? Just apply a button-look to it with styles."

@enderland I would say that in this chatroom, BA is implied to mean Bad BA

The good ones are usually the exception rather than the rule.

@Ampt That's fine. It just doesn't apply in my case.

We have one BA here who told business that we don't actually develop anything, we just configure things. headdesk

@KitZ.Fox we're just filling the stereotype of Devs with no social skills

I wish there was an easier way to identify when a BA is good or not

I could make a ridiculous killing if I wanted as a BA because I'm really good at it

but there's no way to quantify that

Good BAs are devs that don't suck.

Quantifying soft skills - the reason sites like LinkedIn continue to exist.

@KitZ.Fox s/suck/code/g

Doing BA work doesn't necessarily preclude coding.

@KitZ.Fox well the problem is that most devs have no people skills (generalizing horribly but everyone in this room probably will agree) and so you need a technically good and a people good person

I'm getting frustrated for the wrong reason. I want to be able to do the thing I want to do in the manner to which I am accustomed.

And I'm annoyed that I have to convince someone else to let me do it that way.

It seems like he ought to have had to convince me to change the way I'm doing it instead.

@KitZ.Fox you still want to turn back?

No, I just need to manage the change requests so that I'm not missing stuff.

Change requests != features, and I don't want to make this work in a way that it shouldn't just so that I can maintain visibility.

I used change requests before because 1. that's what they were and 2. I could keep them all in one place, instead of what I'm doing now, which is going through my notes and email and memory, trying to figure out if I need a feature or a user story or something else.

It's a lot harder for me to manage.

I have about 100 change requests enqueued in the old project that are now supposed to be converted to features/user stories. Plus new stuff coming in.

Seriously, why can't I do this the way I know how to do it?

Is there harm to that?

@KitZ.Fox Nope.

Augh, now I need to try to prioritize the feature list across three systems with a new stakeholder into the mix.

Meeting in 10 minutes.

inhales

exhales

I will contribute to my team's success today.

I also just noticed that in my new cube, my whiteboard is behind my monitors.

@KitZ.Fox yuck it up but I've done it time and time again to great success.. It's an important skill devs should be trained in. The key is the constructive work with the person who knows what business wants/needs and the person who's going to make it happen. Everytime a dev is given some requirements as designed and structured by someone who doesn't know what that dev is actually going to do, the process is working at a disadvantage towards the goal of the dev creating a product of value.

the idea that devs can't do that which you seem to have as many others do is simply ridiculous and it's held only due to inertia

@JimmyHoffa I hear you, but our devs have no interest in that kind of work. I think that's called "heads down"?

@KitZ.Fox you say that, but have you honestly tried to take one dev and do that with them?

It's not that I think they can't do it. It's that they think it is beneath them.

@KitZ.Fox It's not. And you should beat that into them.

Anyway, I'm out for a meeting. BBL.

I offered to teach a workshop in requirements gathering to the devs this year. We'll see if there's any traction in that.

A) I doubt that and B) if they really do, then you may have a culture problem on your dev team. Product creation is the entire job of a dev, if they think figuring out what the product should be is beneath them... well they're confused.

@JimmyHoffa A. It's true, and B. I don't disagree with you.

Hi, I am looking for a good book on machine learning. (There seem to be too many, of which many are 'out of date' as per comments/reviews.I am confused.) What would be the CLRS of machine learning?

@thePetProjectProgrammer good question, no idea (don't post that Q on the main site though, book recommendations are off topic)

Most of us are industry blokes, we can tell you how to create an application and work through algorithmic concerns but I'm not sure anyone here has done any real machine learning work... @Ixrec or @amon or @MichaelT may have an idea on resources for it though

machine learning is typically relegated to researchy type jobs, finance, or academia. You may poke around CS.SE

It's a heavily mathematical domain. Most industry shops turn their nose up at maths work due to the high risk of mistakes in such advanced works, risk vs. reward says most software is better implemented with lower level types of tasks

I disagree that the likelihood of mistakes is as high as many seem to believe, but I could well be wrong given I've seen numerous devs shy away from it themselves as it's rather out of their depth and learning new stuff is hard

@JimmyHoffa Thanks

@thePetProjectProgrammer No problem, you're always welcome to ask about such things in here - we don't have a particular topic and this is meant to be a safe space for any and all discussions regardless of site topicality.

Machine learning can mean a lot of different things to different people. Starting with solid statistics such as clustering techniques or Bayes filters, the deep end features weird stuff like genetic algos or neural networks, for which I personally have seen little use. Many people that initially look for machine learning to solve their problems just don't understand their problem sufficiently.

@amon don't forget hakuna matata simulations

lets do monty python simulations instead. I'll be the rabbit, you attack…

@amon Don't make me get Thine Holy Hand Grenade

@Ampt Which will only work if you can count to 3. Being a programmer, you'll start with zero and end up with an off-by-one error.

@amon Isn't the off by one error supposed to be when he says 5 instead of 3?

@psr different error, that's an out of bounds error, and what an error it is..

Sup y'all. Is it ok to ask "What MVC Web app framework should I learn next" in here or will I get stabbed?

you can ask anything in chat

Alright, cool. I'm leaving my job. I have 15 years of experience with Rails. I'm very, very tired of Rails. I'm thinking about taking a month or two off (I can get by) and studying AngularJS. Anyone here work with that? How's the grass over on that side of the fence? I totally understand that Angular is a client-side framework and Rails isn't. I know they aren't equivalent. I'm thinking of becoming more of a front-end developer.

Does it ever.

except in CA, then it's either green or dead

And faster.

What if I build a nice portfolio project website?

Gotta go with GlenH7 @Ethan. You may not need the money, but people do desperate things when they haven't worked for awhile. You don't want to carry that pressure into an interview along with the need to "settle" for a job you may not want.

Alright, yeah. I see what you're saying.

uh oh

you didn't do it did you?

the heck is a "universal driver"?

@gl

@GlenH7 Thanks. I appreciate the insight.

@Ethan being employed makes you 100000x more employable to other employers

It's stupid but it's true

The more you play hard to get, the more they want you.

angular might be satisfying from a technical standpoint (stuff like databinding is fun), but is the market also nice? It might seem like switching to Php – lots of barely-qualified competition.

hey-o

Hm. Well that help a little.

That said, I find that pidgeon-holing yourself undersells your potential. You want to be more than just a rails guy, or an angular guy. That is, unless you're the Rails guy, in which case you get paid $$$$/hr to consult for it

@GlenH7 the problem is that not all programmers are created equal

"advanced script" ?

but try and broaden your knowledge, become a "Front end developer" as opposed to a rails dev

@enderland better than TCL or Bash?

Fake it til you make it! :D

i think an html / css / javascript only programmer who is really, really good at their craft is way more valuable than a crappy "full stack" developer

but but buzzwords!

more technologies != better

@durron597 my experience tells me, the people who are really good html/css/javascript only people are the most common ones proclaiming themselves "full stack"

@Ethan - I'm seeing react as more in demand than angular right now, and a better framework. But angular 2 might change that. Also, job markets vary. But around me angular meetups were filled with recruiters a year ago, not so much anymore. Chasing hot technologies is always tricky.

Yeah, I'd definitely do that. They need to see something you've built.

I immediately thought of python, which is why I was curious :-)

@psr angular 2 will be rather vaporous (and probably worse than the original - it smells like second system effect so strongly..)