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I don't like many sudden unplanned meetings appearing during your estimated development hours. It consumes some development time and destroys your momentum.

We follow the 2 weeks sprint that contains sprint ceremonies like sprint planning, demo, retro, daily stand ups and backlog grooming meetings. My capacity should be less then 80 hours since there are sprint ceremonies and unplanned meetings that happen during development hours. Unfortunately, my capacity is still set to 80 hours and meetings hours are not deducted. This puts me to a disadvantage as I need to do unpaid OT/weekend work just to make up for the lost time consumed by meetings.

Those 1 hour/30 minutes meeting piles up thus consuming development work hours. So a simple example is that you have 32 hours estimated to finish a big user story but sudden unplanned meetings and sprint ceremony meetings will consume some of that 32 hours. I will bring this up in our next retrospective meeting.

Comments
  • 1
    @NickyBones yes from now on I will not only add the usual buffer. I will also need to add the new buffer meeting to my user stories.

    I was willing to do this from the start for the sake of the project, team and things to get done but when this will happen all the time then it is really exhausting.

    Some quotes say go for the extra mile but doing the extra mile all the time is not realistic. You will get burned out 🤷
  • 4
    My default is "this will take n solid days of dev"

    Solid: a straight 8 hour block, my calendar is viewable by anyone that wants to complain and they can clearly see the < 2 hours a day I may not be in meetings.
  • 1
    @C0D4 thanks for the tip! I really like what you suggested there and I believe it will work.

    To sum up estimation:
    - real estimate of user story + buffer estimate of user story + buffer for unplanned/planned meetings + tell them N solid working days estimate for the user story
  • 4
    @Devnergy I usually plan for half my day to be destroyed by something planned or otherwise.

    So that's already 2 days per dev day.

    Then to actually estimate,
    I throw T-shirt sizing at the task.

    Small, medium, large, extra large.

    Each with a cap for hours.

    4, 16, 32, >32

    That way, you always offer the upper limit of the shirt size and can gain some you time in the second half of the sprint - if you can get away from the meetings for a day. 😏
  • 2
    Why the hell would you do unpaid OT because of this though.
  • 2
    I used to timebox my (and my team's) meeting commitments within our sprint. After meetings we would log time on the meeting ticket, and if it overran there was clear visibility to that fact.
  • 0
    @electrineer because they don't do paid overtimes and the user stories needs to be done.
  • 0
    @boostedanimal thanks. Yes from now on I will log all the sprint ceremonies meetings and unplanned meetings so that I can show them when some user story is not finished because some development hours were consumed by unplanned meetings.
  • 1
    @Devnergy it's done when it's completed
  • 2
    I agree so much. I freak out just reading about delivery estimates and popup meetings in the same post.

    It's ridiculous to have "hours until delivery" Deadlines in a workplace where you have unplanned meetings.

    The managers often also tend to forget how ridiculous it is. They'll easily agree to an 8 hour deadline one day and the schedule your for 5 hours of meetings the next..
    "Should we move the deadline then?"
    "- no lets wait and see"

    Sadly it falls on us devs to remind the org that dev time is only those rare minutes between meetings ; minus the restart time.
  • 2
    @NickyBones Yes. It sadly is. 🥲

    Just to avoid those pesky follow up meetings about "you said 8 hours and it looks to be taking 9"
    - Yeah but that's cause you added a long meeting today!
    "Okay we need to have another meeting about how to handle meetings"
    😑
  • 1
    @C0D4 Perfect in theory but does anyone understand or respect it?
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