Yeah, it won't work without a stable team. And that may be okay in a true agile environment but I've always had a manager who wants some type of estimate/high level schedule.
We do T-shirt sizes mapped to numbers, because recording effort in numbers lets you get an avg etc...
Yeah, you are doing it wrong if scrum is deadlines. I've worked with people who had to pull all nighters to get all sprint content done before the sprint closes. I'm using it more as a window to do some cheap analysis on our progress.
The things I've taken from scrum and use at every team:
- plan in 2 week chunks
- estimate in points (relative size to something you've already done), emphasis on consistent estimates for each dev.
- make sure you define what 'done' means, and make sure it relates to what exactly you are trying to measure (Eg just coding effort, work till feature can ship?, etc). This is probably the most tricky bit.
- capture total velocity every 2 weeks and eventually use the avg for future planning
- review the entire process and modify things that take a lot of time for devs.
z/OS (aka OS360 aka MVS) supports programs going back to the 60s and I just talked with a DE at IBM who is still using a program compiled circa Apollo 11 mission.
Crime and punishment was riveting. “Brothers” was a slog. Maybe I didn’t make it far enough through. This comes from someone who lived in Russia and enjoys Russian culture.
I used to have crazy IDE-like setups but have realized that Vim is great for straight text manipulation (writing bash scripts, log parsing, etc) and VS code or eclipse is great for heavy duty programming. Now my vimrc is less than 50 lines and no plugins.