When outsourcing goes bad, part 12 of 16
Where are my story points, Gujarat?
A few folks had beers to finish, but most were leaving, so I left too. I went outside, got in my car, and was about to start the engine when my friend Natalie called. I chatted with her for maybe 30 minutes, talking about travel plans and when we might next see each other. (This is the same Natalie who is my co-author on the book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps.") Then we hung up.
I heard angry voices. I looked over and saw Arwin and Gujarat, standing by their cars. By now, everyone else had gone home. I don't think they knew I was still there, sitting in my car.
Arwin: You lied to me. You totally lied to me. You said you could do this but you can't.
Gujarat: We misallocated some staff. At first, we didn’t understand how complex the software was. That's not entirely our fault, we were relying on the people at AndersonRiskAssessment to explain what the software was like. But we have re-allocated our staff now. We are getting for you much better engineers, a much better team.
Arwin: We warned you, up front, that we needed engineers who understood the USA insurance industry. And you told us that your people did. But they didn't. You don't have one person on staff who knows anything about the American insurance industry!
Gujarat: Some of our best insurance engineers had to be assigned to some other clients, but we've made changes now, so you will have a much better team going forward. Much better. We have found the people you need.
Arwin: Where are my story points, Gujarat? Where are my story points? You promised me 10 story points every week from every developer. But you don't even come close. You deliver half of that.
Gujarat: The team is getting faster. Not as much as we hoped, but soon, very soon. We will have great momentum by this summer.
Arwin: You promised me story points, but you haven't been able to deliver. You lied to me.
Gujarat: No, no, no, we are very serious about this. At every level, everyone at DevModeMax is working to make sure you get what you need.
Arwin: Well I am definitely not getting what I need.
Perhaps they continued like that for a long while. They were still arguing when I left. I drove back to my hotel. For awhile, I lay in bed and thought about the evening, and in particular, I thought about story points. One reason they make a bad metric for enforcing a contract is that, following the rules of Agile development, the software engineers estimate the story points themselves. This is supposed to lead to a mental commitment on their part: having made the estimate themselves, they should live up to it. But if you were going to punish individual engineers for not doing story points, then the situation is suddenly as if students were asked to grade their own papers: you would expect grade inflation. Suddenly every student gets an A+, which they assign to themselves. Likewise, with the engineers, they could inflate their estimates. If they think a project is worth 4 story points, maybe they will write 6 or 7 or 8. That way they can do less work while getting credit for a full week of effort. If Arwin really wanted to use story points as the main metric for tracking the quality of the work that DevModeMax was doing, then the managers would have to estimate the story points, instead of the engineers, but then that violated a core tenant of Agile development. At that point we might as well drop the pretense of self-directing teams, and simply revert to an older, more authoritarian model, where the managers simply assign the work and demand it be done by a certain time.
Read the whole series:
1. But what do these glib little bullet points mean?
2. When the CTO does not trust their own team
3. Everyone is under pressure, everyone is too busy to help
4. They lie. They lie flagrantly. They lie all of the time, about everything.
5. That place is a total sweatshop!
7. I am very, very proud of you. The work you are doing is amazing.
8. I blame you. You suck. You are the problem.
9. We just got $10,000 dollars!!!!
10. The Taj Mahal was built with blood
12. Where are my story points, Gujurat?
13. We are the best people to help him, so why doesn't he want our help?
14. Should a toilet be listed as an amenity?
15. I am simply telling you how things work in India
16. Too big to fail: when you've no option but to brazen it out