The growth of the process

I’ve been working on the same app for 4 years. We started as a three-person team (not counting designers and field specialists): our project manager/product owner/tester, one backend guy and one frontend guy. Our development speed was incredible: we talked every day, and the specification, changes and tasks were described in OneNote. Oh, the good times, when we could just focus on development.

Then we started using Redmine, then JIRA. At first, each major feature was described in a single task, then in a story; now we create an epic for it. Why? It’s not the complexity of the features, that’s as high as it used to be. Could it be the complexity of the code? It might be, as a large codebase can require extra work to add new things. But we have that covered: new things are reasonably easy to add. So what is it? The number of people in the team. Back in the day, the three of us could discuss everything, write down the most important parts and leave the details out. Today we have 2 backend developers, 5 frontend developers (including me, somewhat of a scrum master), 2–3 testers, a product owner, and a lot of other teams whose projects depend on us. Leaving something unwritten just won’t work. Every detail must be written down, otherwise it sets off a wave of questions and misunderstandings that doubles or triples the time it takes to actually deliver the feature.

And those are only the tasks… We also have kickoffs, retrospectives, planning sessions, standups, meetings to settle conflicts within the team… I miss small teams.