An Observation at Planning Meetings
Assuming it's a mix of Engineers and non-Engineers (Product, PMs, Design, etc): When Engineers get rabbit holey with implementation details trying to come to consensus on the specs, the non-techies in the room:
- Eyes glaze over.
- Get quiet. There's obviously not much they can contribute. They're non-engineers.
👆This is time they could have spent doing their actual work. Tech talk is tedious to non-technicals. Now we're just wasting their time.
Then the Engineers rush to find those spots in code, live during the meeting, and try to quickly come to consensus. This 2 minutes is almost never enough time to arrive at such important details.
Significant Events Between Planning and Coding
A number of important things happen between Planning meetings and us writing the code, even in a couple days:
-
More public information is available now. The Internet is growing at an astronomical rate.
- Posts
- Comments
- Documentation
- Newer versions of libraries released
- Some libraries may have been deprecated since
- Best practices on how to do it right
- Posts on pitfalls
- Better alternative libraries
- Better alternative way of doing it
- More Internal information now exists in your Corporate Knoweledgebase.
- More lore has been exchanged between brains - Verbal, Slack, etc.
Most Engineers I know do a quick Googling to validate their assumptions, before beginning any fairly significant changeset. During that first hour of coding, you almost always find things that could never possibly have been discovered at Planning Meetings.
I can't count the times I've started coding a ticket and go, "Oh, there's some new library or pattern that does that way better."
Now those Implementation Details on the ticket are invalid.
I've heard some devs defend this by saying, "The Planning Meeting is implementation time."
Let's look at the definition.
Implementation is the execution or practice of a plan.
Otherwise known as "doing the work" (writing the code).
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