A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
When developing code for first release, we had a dedicated HIP Sprint (Hardening, Innovation, Planning) and we had the most productive team in the company. Other teams were struggling cause they were just using the HIP as another Sprint. So what did we do? Got rid of the HIP, naturally. You see, some teams weren’t using it and it’s unfair to those teams that we’re not doing work when they are. Now everyone’s suffering!
Also had legitimate agile practices (budgets are for HR, work on what you need to work on and let someone else worry about paying for it) and we were the most productive team in the company. So, naturally, they need to get a bunch of C-suite guys to come over and run things cause it would be really embarrassing for them if they weren’t involved in the new hotness. Naturally, though, we gotta go back to funding buckets, cause those c-suite guys don’t understand why they got to talk to the developers when they want something fixed instead of handing things down from on high. Oh no! Suddenly all these issues are popping up in the workflow, guess we gotta force in ai to fix the problems.