Agile, Scrum, and Jira Jokes: Sprints, Standups, and Retros

Scrum is just organized panic with sticky notes.

"Daily stand-up." Nobody stands. Everyone suffers.

Agile means changing requirements efficiently.

Sprint planning: Where hope goes to die.

"This task should only take a few points." Famous last words.

Velocity charts are astrology for developers.

"Let's take this offline." Meaning: We will never speak of this again.

Scrum masters have two jobs: Scheduling meetings and saying "parking lot."

"We need to stay agile." Translation: Everything changed again.

Retrospectives are group therapy with Jira tickets.

"What blockers do you have?" "Reality."

Agile teams spend more time estimating work than doing it.

Every sprint starts with confidence and ends with survival.

"Can we fit one more story into the sprint?" No.

Scrum boards are digital proof that chaos can be color coded.

"We need better sprint discipline." Nobody knows what that means.

Backlogs grow faster than children.

"This ticket lacks acceptance criteria." So does life.

Agile: Because random panic needed structure.

"The sprint goal is achievable." Statistics disagree.

Half of Scrum terminology sounds like medieval combat strategy.

"Let's point the story." "I'm feeling emotionally like a 13."

Every team eventually creates a ticket to track why tickets are failing.

"That sounds like technical debt." Everything is technical debt now.

Burn-down charts only burn down morale.

"Can we revisit our process?" Here comes another meeting.

Agile ceremonies: The rituals of modern software development.

"This work spilled into the next sprint." Like every sprint before it.

Jira notifications are the digital version of being hunted.

"We value individuals and interactions." Please update the ticket anyway.

Scrum masters can detect unestimated work from miles away.

"Can we refine the backlog?" Nobody has emotionally recovered from the last refinement.

Agile is mostly: Renaming problems every few years.

"The sprint was successful." Barely.

Scrum is what happens when software development meets calendar management.

"Can everyone see my screen?" The official opening line of Agile.

The sprint started Monday. Confidence ended Tuesday.

"This task is blocked." By what? "Everything."

Every Scrum board eventually becomes modern art.

"Can we estimate this quickly?" Three hours later: Still discussing edge cases.

Agile teams spend half their lives moving tickets between columns.

"That's out of scope." Nothing has ever truly been out of scope.

Sprint retrospectives always begin with: "What went well?" Silence.

"We need better alignment." Nobody knows what alignment means anymore.

Every developer has at least one ticket marked: "Investigate issue."

Agile is mostly: Trying to predict the future with story points.

"Can we make this a spike?" Translation: We have absolutely no idea how this works.

Scrum masters can smell an unupdated Jira ticket from across the building.

"This should be reusable." It won't be.

The backlog contains tickets older than some employees.

"Can we close this ticket?" "Does it work?" "Close enough."

Every sprint has one developer quietly carrying the entire release.

"We just need clearer requirements." The requirements: "Make it better."

Agile meetings could have been messages. The messages also could have been ignored.

"We're over capacity this sprint." Like every sprint.

Story points are just emotional estimates.

"Can you add comments to the ticket?" The comments: "Still broken."

Every Agile coach eventually says: "You're not doing Agile correctly."

"The acceptance criteria changed." Of course they did.

Half the sprint is spent waiting for approvals from people not in the sprint.

"We need transparency." Jira: Completely unreadable.

Agile teams don't miss deadlines. They "re-prioritize deliverables."

"Can we reduce technical debt?" New feature requests: Absolutely not.

Every Scrum call includes at least one person pretending their microphone issue is temporary.

"Can you hop on a quick call?" That call: 96 minutes long.

Sprint planning is basically fantasy football for software developers.

"This dependency wasn't identified earlier." Nobody looked.

Every team has one mysterious ticket nobody wants to touch.

"Can we parallelize the work?" The work: Completely dependent on itself.

Agile transformed software development into: Constantly scheduled uncertainty.

"This bug only happens in production." Naturally.

The sprint goal changed so many times it now qualifies as fan fiction.

Every Jira workflow eventually needs its own training session.

"The deployment went smoothly." Everyone immediately becomes suspicious.

Scrum is basically: Group project trauma with dashboards.

"Can we automate this process?" Six months later: Manual workaround.

Agile maturity is realizing no sprint ever goes exactly as planned.

"The client had one small request." Entire architecture rewritten.

Every stand-up has one person giving a TED Talk instead of an update.

Scrum boards are proof humans can turn stress into rectangles.

"We'll address that after release." Nobody ever addressed it.

Agile teams move fast. Usually toward another meeting.

"Can we improve sprint velocity?" "Can we improve reality first?"

Every sprint contains: Hope, confusion, panic, caffeine, and deployment anxiety.

Agile is what happens when software developers discover calendars and suffering simultaneously.

My agile coach was a developer 14 years ago. He keeps mentioning it. The last language he shipped to production was Flash.

The coach asked if we had tried a retrospective. We had just finished one. He asked if we had tried a retrospective on the retrospective.

Day rate: $3,500. Deliverable: a fishbone diagram on a whiteboard nobody photographed before the cleaners came.

He said the team was not ready for agile yet. We had been doing Scrum for nine years.

Every other sentence contains the phrase shu ha ri. We are still in shu. We have always been in shu. Shu is a country we live in now.

The coach is framework agnostic. He only recommends SAFe.

We bought a $250,000 agile transformation. We still ship once a quarter. The transformation is going great, apparently.

He said we need to install a culture of curiosity. I asked what the install command was. He scheduled a workshop.

Planning poker app, 12 engineers, one story. Results: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, coffee, infinity, and one person who picked the question mark on purpose.

Coach: let me share a metaphor. Me: please do not. Coach: imagine the team is a garden.

The certification took two days. The damage took two years.

He asked us to T-shirt size the work. The estimates came back XS, S, M, L, XL, and one item marked 1998 Hanes.

After 40 minutes of debate between a 5 and an 8, he said, let us just call it a 5. The story took six weeks.

We hired a Scrum coach, a SAFe coach, a LeSS coach, and a Scrum@Scale coach. They are now in a retrospective about why nothing ships.

Coach: we are doing the Spotify model. Me: Spotify abandoned the Spotify model. Coach: that is because they were not doing it right.

The Jira workflow redesign took three sprints. The states are now: To Do, In Progress, In Progress But Different, Blocked, Blocked But Hopeful, In Review, In Review By Someone Who Cares, and Done.

He said servant leadership means he serves the team. I asked him to write the unit tests. He said that was not the kind of serving he meant.

Coach: how did the sprint go. Me: we shipped the feature. Coach: but how did it feel.

We hired the coach to remove impediments. He has been here eight months. The biggest impediment is now on his calendar.

He runs a values workshop every quarter. The values are always the same five words on different colored post-it notes.

The same post-it notes. Every quarter. I have started recognizing the handwriting.

Coach: you are not doing it right. Me: we doubled revenue. Coach: but not in the agile way.

He told me psychological safety means anyone can speak up without fear. I told him his framework is bad. He scheduled a one-on-one with my manager.

The daily standup became a weekly. The weekly became a check-in. The check-in became an async update. The async update became a Jira ticket nobody reads. Agile.

He asked us to do a fishbone diagram. We asked what problem we were solving. He said we would find out from the diagram.

Velocity went up 40 percent. Output stayed flat. Story points got smaller. The coach called it a win.

I asked how to measure his impact. He said impact is a flow metric and we should not measure individuals. His invoice itemizes by the hour.

Coach: have you read the manifesto. Me: yes. Coach: have you read it in the original Snowbird, Utah.

He introduced a new ceremony called a pre-retrospective. It is where we plan what we will say in the retrospective.

The Definition of Done now has 14 bullet points. Item 9 is doing your taxes.

He brought in a second coach to coach the first coach. They are now coaching each other. Nothing has shipped in two months. They call it pairing.

Coach: agile is a mindset, not a methodology. Me: so why is the invoice for a methodology. Coach: that is for the workshops about the mindset.

He said failure is a learning opportunity. The transformation failed. He learned to bill another quarter.

I asked what he did before agile coaching. He said he was a project manager. I asked what changed. He said the day rate.

Coach: tell me about your team. Me: we are eight engineers shipping a checkout flow. Coach: I am hearing that you feel unheard.

We did a value stream mapping exercise. The biggest waste in the value stream was the value stream mapping exercise.

He sells a 12-week journey from doing agile to being agile. Week 13 is when you notice nothing on the roadmap moved.

I asked which framework fit us best. He said the one he was certified in last month.

Coach: let us run a premortem. Me: on what. Coach: on the premortem.

He runs an exercise where we draw the team as an animal. Last quarter we were a dolphin. This quarter we are a dolphin in transition.

I asked for a concrete recommendation. He gave me a book list. The first book is by him.

Coach: any blockers today. Me: you, mostly. Coach: I am hearing energy in the team.

After two years of transformation work, the engineering team finally pushed back. The coach said this was the breakthrough he had been waiting for and added another six months to the engagement.

His LinkedIn post about psychological safety has 1,400 likes. The same week, three engineers on the team he coaches went on stress leave.

On every Zoom call, his certification is framed on the wall behind him. The frame is bigger than the certificate.

He renamed the team leads to tribe leads, the senior engineers to chapter leads, and the lunch club to a guild. Nothing else changed.

Coach: we need to ladder this up. Me: ladder it up to what. Coach: to the ladder.

He gave a keynote about moving from projects to products. The keynote was a project. It had a fixed scope, a fixed deadline, and a status report.

Coach: let us run a discovery sprint. Me: we have been live in production for four years. Coach: then a rediscovery sprint.

He brought out the Liberating Structures cards and ran a fist-of-five vote on which card to use. The team voted one. He read it as five.

My scrum master asked what my blockers were. I said the same thing I said yesterday. He nodded and put it in the parking lot.

The parking lot has been at capacity since 2019.

Daily standup, day 743. What I did yesterday: meetings. What I will do today: meetings. Blockers: meetings.

The scrum master said the daily is not a status meeting. Then the director joined and asked everyone for a status.

Our retro action item from last sprint was to follow up on the retro action item from the sprint before.

The velocity went up 30 percent. Nobody shipped anything. We just changed how we estimate.

I asked the scrum master if we could skip standup. He said the ceremony is sacred. Half the team was on vacation.

The PM added four stories on Wednesday. The scrum master said the sprint is the sprint. The PM added them anyway.

Sprint planning ran two hours over. To save time, we agreed to skip the retro.

Scrum Master: any questions? Seven muted faces. One slow head shake. Someone's dog barks.

The burndown chart has not burned down since onboarding. It just sits there, flat, like a heart monitor on a corpse.

I got my CSM certification for $1,400. The team still calls everything I do project management.

We do kanban. We call it scrum. We have a sprint. The sprint never ends. The board has no columns. Everything is in progress.

The scrum master sent a calendar invite for a meeting to plan the meeting to prep for the meeting.

Let's timebox this, he said, at minute 47 of a 30 minute discussion.

Our impediment log has one entry. It says the company.

The retro is optional. Nobody comes. The scrum master writes a summary anyway. Nobody reads it.

I told the scrum master my blocker was the scrum master. He put it in the parking lot.

The team voted on story points. Three said 8. Two said 1. One said fish. We averaged it to 5.

Scrum Master: did anyone get stuck? Me, drowning since Monday: nope, all good.

We carry over five stories every sprint. We never reduce the commitment. The scrum master calls this a healthy backlog.

I asked when we would handle the technical debt. He said we'll handle that in the next sprint. He has said this for two years.

Our scrum master is also the project manager, the people manager, the OKR writer, the release coordinator, and the person who orders the team lunch. He gets paid for one of these.

I joined a standup five minutes late. They were still doing introductions.

The Jira automation rule fires every time you breathe near a ticket. Nobody knows who set it up. Nobody knows how to turn it off.

We tracked velocity for nine months. Management used it to compare teams. Now nobody estimates honestly. The velocity is great.

Scrum Master: let's parking-lot that. Me: that was the parking lot item.

My calendar on Tuesday morning is one solid block of color. Refinement. Planning. Sync. Pre-sync. Sync-the-sync.

We do a Definition of Done workshop every six months. Nothing has ever been done.

The scrum master asked the team to share their wellness on a scale of 1 to 5. Everyone said 4. The scrum master said 4. Everyone is fine.

I'll follow up offline, he said, about the third time he said I'll follow up offline.

Story refinement is on the calendar for 90 minutes. We refine one ticket. The rest of the time is people negotiating about the ticket we just refined.

The director joined the retro. The retro became very positive.

Scrum Master: this should be a 3. Developer: it touches auth. Scrum Master: let's go with 3.

We have a backlog grooming meeting. We have a refinement meeting. We have a discovery meeting. They are the same meeting. They are all on Tuesday.

The scrum master rolled out a new estimation framework. It was the old estimation framework with a new name.

I told my standup update in 12 seconds. The scrum master asked me to expand on that.

Our retro produced 14 action items. The owner of all 14 is TBD.

Scrum Master: is anyone else stuck? Silence. The kind of silence where you can hear three different people trying to unmute.

He moved the standup 15 minutes earlier so nobody would dial in late. Now everybody dials in 15 minutes earlier and late.

We hired a second scrum master because the first one was overloaded with scrum master meetings.

The scrum master asked the team to be more agile. The team asked what that meant. He put it in the parking lot.

Sprint goal: deliver value to the customer. That has been the sprint goal for 38 sprints.

He showed the team the new Jira workflow. It had 11 statuses. Two of them were called Done.

Planning poker. Six people vote 1. One person votes 5. The 5 talks for 20 minutes. The team votes again. Everyone votes 5.

We use Fibonacci. Everything is a 5. The 1 and 2 are too small to bother with. The 8 and 13 get split. So everything is a 5.

Scrum Master: what is the smallest thing we could ship? The team lists 14 things. None of them are small.

The sprint review demo broke live in front of the VP. The scrum master called it a learning opportunity. The engineer called it Tuesday.

The retro has a shout-outs segment. Nobody has contributed to shout-outs since the third sprint. It is still on the agenda.

The stakeholder shows up to every demo. He has never been to a standup. He has opinions about the demo.

I am the scrum master. I am also the only person fixing the flaky tests. These two facts are related.

The impediment removal board has 23 items. None of them have been removed. The scrum master calls it a wish list and laughs. He is the only one laughing.

Velocity dropped this sprint because one engineer took PTO. The manager wants to know what we are doing about it.

The manager called to say the team is behind. The team is not behind. The team is exactly where the team said it would be in planning. The manager was not in planning.

PM treats velocity as a commitment. Scrum master explains it is a forecast. PM nods. Next sprint, PM treats velocity as a commitment.

Sprint planning is a two-hour meeting to commit to a plan that will last six hours.

"What is the sprint goal." "Finish last sprint."

Planning poker is a structured argument with cards.

"I voted three." "I voted thirteen." We were looking at different tickets.

Every team has the developer who only votes one or one hundred.

"This is a one." It is not a one.

"Refine the backlog before planning." Nobody did.

"Capacity this sprint." Everyone has a day off nobody mentioned.

"We have 40 points of capacity." "Let's commit to 70."

Sprint planning math ignores meetings. Meetings are most of the sprint.

"This sprint will be different." It was not.

"Are the acceptance criteria clear." The ticket has no description.

"Let's pull in one more." Four hours later, still arguing about it.

The ticket marked Spike has been a spike for six sprints.

"What is a spike." An admission of ignorance with a deadline.

Every sprint starts with a clean board. The board is dirty by lunch.

"We will not take in mid-sprint work." The CEO sent an email at 9:14.

"This is dependent on the platform team." The platform team is in planning right now.

Sprint planning is the meeting where I learn what I will fail at this fortnight.

"Can you take the front-end half." The ticket is back-end only.

"Let's break this story down." Three hours later: still one story.

"It is a Fibonacci value." "I picked 17." 17 is not Fibonacci. Nobody corrects them.

The team velocity is computed by averaging the last three sprints. The last three sprints were a holiday, a hackathon, and a hotfix week.

"What does done look like for this." Silence.

"This is a quick one." The quick ones are never quick.

Sprint planning runs over. The next meeting also runs over. The day is gone.

"Anyone have concerns." Everyone has concerns. Nobody says anything.

"The PM will groom the rest after planning." The PM is the one running planning.

"I think this is closer to a five." "It's a thirteen." "You haven't looked at the codebase."

Every planning meeting includes one ticket that turns into an architecture debate.

"This affects the data model." Well, that is the rest of the meeting.

"Roll over to next sprint." It was rolled over from the sprint before.

Sprint planning ends. The sprint goal is written down. Nobody reads it again.

"Did everyone agree." Nobody disagreed. Those are different.

"Two-week sprints." The first day is planning. The last day is demo and retro. We have eight days.

Eight days minus meetings is three days.

"This sprint we are committing to a 30 percent stretch." We missed last sprint's baseline.

"Confidence level on this story." The person who has to do it: thumbs sideways.

Every sprint plan assumes nothing breaks in production. Something always breaks in production.

"We will revisit at standup." The revisit never happens.

"Anything we can carry over." All of it.

"Estimate the unknowns." That is not what an estimate is.

Sprint planning is the only meeting where being optimistic is a personality flaw.

"The QA on this is just a smoke test." No QA is just a smoke test.

"How long for the integration test setup." The person who did it last left in March.

Every sprint goal contains the word "finalize." Nothing was finalised.

"Can we leave a buffer." The buffer is what we already planned.

"We are committing." The word commit doing a lot of work in that sentence.

"What if we just plan for half." The room considers it for the first time in five years.

Sprint planning is the most accurate forecast a team will ever produce. It is wrong by Tuesday.

Retro is the meeting where we agree to do better and then do exactly the same thing.

"What went well." Silence. "Okay, moving on."

Start. Stop. Continue. Nothing started. Nothing stopped. Everything continued.

"This is a safe space." Management is in the room.

Every retro has the one person who only writes "too many meetings."

The action item from last retro: too many meetings. The meeting count this sprint: up.

"Who wants to own this action item." The same person again.

Retro icebreakers are the longest part of retro.

"Share a song that captures your sprint." It is going to be a long hour.

"Anonymous sticky notes." Everyone knows whose handwriting that is.

The Mad Sad Glad board. Mad column: full. Glad column: empty.

"Let's group similar themes." They are all the same theme.

"Anyone want to add to the board." Three minutes of silent typing. No new cards.

Every retro produces an action item. Every action item never gets done. Next retro: the same action item.

"Why did this not get done last sprint." "Too many meetings."

The retro tool ate the cards three minutes before the meeting ended.

"Did anyone screenshot the board." Nobody did.

"This was a long sprint." It was the same length as every other sprint.

"Can we shorten retro." The action item: add a meeting to discuss shortening retro.

Every retro has the moment where the team finally says the real problem. The scrum master writes: "Communication."

"What would you do differently." "Not be here."

The team voted to try a new retro format. The new format: the old format with different colours.

"Let's dot-vote." Everyone votes for the same card. The card is "too many meetings."

"What blocked us this sprint." The blockers raised in standup that nobody followed up on.

Retro is the only place psychological safety gets discussed and never demonstrated.

"Let's hear from the quiet voices." The quiet voices remain quiet.

"We are improving as a team." Velocity: flat for two years.

The action item: "Improve documentation." The owner: "Team." The due date: blank.

"Did we close the action items from last retro." Nobody can find last retro.

Every retro at every company eventually produces the action item: "Have fewer meetings."

It does not work.

"What did we learn this sprint." "Estimates are still wrong."

"Can we start retro on time." "That is on the agenda for next retro."

The new retro facilitator made everyone draw their feelings. Three resignations followed.

"Let's appreciate someone on the team." Everyone appreciates the person on vacation.

"This is the last retro of the quarter." It looks identical to the first one.

Action item: "Refine acceptance criteria earlier." Sprint after sprint after sprint.

"Who wants to facilitate next time." The same volunteer. They always volunteer. They are tired.

"Sprint went well." The demo had three bugs and a rollback.

"Anything we want to celebrate." It is Thursday. The sprint shipped a config change.

The retro lasted 90 minutes. The action items came to four lines.

"Anything we want to flag to leadership." A list of fourteen things. The flag email never gets sent.

"Same time next sprint." The calendar invite is recurring forever.

The retro retrospective is when I sit alone after retro wondering what I just did with my afternoon.

"Continuous improvement." The continuous part is doing fine.

Jira is a database with feelings.

"Did you create a ticket for it?" Not yet. "Then it didn't happen."

Every Jira board is one filter away from chaos.

"This ticket has been open since 2019." It is a coworker now.

Epics contain stories. Stories contain sub-tasks. Sub-tasks contain despair.

"Can you link the ticket?" "Which one of the four duplicates."

Jira's search is a personality test.

"This should be a sub-task." "Of which parent?" Nobody knows.

The Done column is a rumour.

"I closed the ticket." It reopened on its own out of spite.

Jira workflows are flowcharts drawn during a panic attack.

"Move this to In Progress." The transition requires three approvals and a screen.

Story points are made up. The arguments about them are real.

"This is a five." "No, this is an eight." The ticket: One checkbox change.

Every Jira instance has one custom field nobody remembers adding.

"Why is this required." A project manager left in 2018 and the field stayed.

The backlog has its own gravitational field.

"Let's groom the backlog." "Let's not."

Jira is the only application where I have ever clicked a button and waited for it to think about itself.

"The page is loading." It has been loading since the standup ended.

Every team has the one ticket marked Investigate.

It has been there for six months. Nobody investigates.

"Reproduce steps?" "Use the app."

The Jira mobile app exists. Nobody knows why.

"I'll add a comment." The comment is now longer than the original spec.

Acceptance criteria: Make it work. Make it good. Make it fast. Make it by Friday.

"This ticket is blocked." By what. "Another ticket that is also blocked."

Every Jira ticket has a parent. Every parent has trauma.

"I assigned it to you." When. "Six weeks ago."

The notification email said the ticket was updated. The update was a label change.

"Can we use components for this?" The components list: 147 entries, none capitalised the same way.

Jira filters are written in JQL. JQL is written by people who survived SQL.

"resolution = Done AND assignee = currentUser()" Returns nothing. I have done nothing.

Every dashboard has one chart that has been broken since installation.

"The pie chart shows three slices." There are forty statuses.

"I can't find the ticket." It is in the other project.

There are nine other projects.

The Jira admin is a single person. They are scared.

"Can you add a status?" The scream was audible from another building.

Jira automation rules are how I learned that infinite loops are real.

"The rule fired 4,800 times last night." Every ticket has 4,800 comments now.

"Did you read the ticket?" Yes. "Did you read the comments?" The comments contradict the ticket.

Every Jira board eventually grows a swimlane called Other.

The Other swimlane is where tickets go to live forever.

"Estimate this." "In what units." "Whatever you usually use." The team has never agreed on units.

"This needs a fix version." The fix version is a date in the past.

Labels in Jira are a graveyard of typos.

back-end backend back_end Backend Back-End

"I filtered by label." Four of the five typos got missed.

Every retro produces a ticket titled Improve Jira Hygiene.

It is never picked up.

"Sprint goal: clear the backlog." The backlog grew by twenty during the sprint.

"This is a bug, not a story." "Then change the issue type." The issue type can only be changed by the admin.

"Add me as a watcher." I now get an email every time someone breathes near the ticket.

"Why is this in Code Review." There is no code.

Bulk edit is the most dangerous feature ever shipped to an enterprise tool.

"I bulk-closed 312 tickets." They were the wrong 312.

Every Jira instance has a ticket older than at least one employee.

Linked issues: blocks, is blocked by, relates to, duplicates, is duplicated by, clones, causes, mentions. All of them mean the same thing now.

"I created the ticket." The work is done.

"Quick update meeting." Duration: 2 hours.

Every IT project manager has mastered the phrase: "Let's circle back on that."

Project timelines are basically fan fiction.

"This should be a simple change." The project manager has heard this before.

A project manager's natural habitat is between a delayed vendor and an angry executive.

"We're only slightly behind schedule." Translation: Everything is on fire.

IT project management is mostly: Meetings about future meetings.

"Can we move the launch date up?" "Can we move reality up too?"

Nobody knows what the project scope is anymore. We are operating on vibes.

Every project starts with optimism and ends with: "Who approved this?"

"Can we add one small feature?" The feature: Requires rebuilding the entire platform.

Project managers don't sleep. They just close their eyes and think about dependencies.

"Stakeholders would like a few changes." The few changes: The entire application.

Every IT project eventually reaches the phase called: "Unexpected complications."

"We're agile." Meaning: Nobody knows what's happening, but faster.

A project manager's superpower is translating panic into PowerPoint slides.

"The developers estimated 2 weeks." Calendar: 4 months later.

Risk management is basically professional worrying.

Every project dashboard is one color away from emotional damage.

"Can we get a status update?" "Emotionally or technically?"

Project managers are human shock absorbers for bad decisions.

"We'll handle that in phase two." There is no phase two.

The project was labeled "high priority." Like all the other projects.

"We just need better communication." Nobody reads the emails.

IT project management is mostly explaining why things take time to people who think computers are magic.

"This deadline is firm." Until next Tuesday.

Every project manager has stared silently at a Gantt chart while questioning life choices.

"The client changed requirements again." Of course they did.

Half of project management is scheduling meetings. The other half is rescheduling them.

"Everything is on track." This statement expires in 14 minutes.

A successful project is one that survives long enough to launch.

"Can we test in production?" Absolutely not. Eventually: Tests in production anyway.

Every IT project manager secretly dreams of a project with clear requirements.

"This is blocking the release." So is everything else.

Nobody fears the phrase "small update" more than IT teams.

"Can you give us an exact timeline?" "No human can."

The project plan looked perfect until users arrived.

Every missed deadline starts with confidence.

"We're making great progress." The build hasn't worked since Wednesday.

Being an IT project manager is basically: Herding cats while translating chaos into spreadsheets.

The ticket was opened in 2019. It is now P2. It was P2 when I joined. The reporter no longer works here. The component no longer exists.

The bug is reproducible. It requires a full moon, the staging database, and a user from a country we do not yet support.

I marked the ticket as won't fix. It was reopened. I closed it again. It was reopened again. The reporter is my own past self from 2018. I cannot stop them.

Triage is on Thursday. There are 217 tickets in the queue. There is one hour blocked. We have done this every Thursday for four years. The queue has never been empty.

The bug only happens on the user's machine. The user is the CEO.

Severity 1. Priority 4. Both labels are on the same ticket. They are both correct. Nobody has been able to explain why.

I added needs more info. The reporter added a screenshot. The screenshot was a photo of their monitor. The photo was taken at an angle. The screen had glare. The error message was illegible.

I labeled a ticket cannot reproduce. Three weeks later it reproduced. The ticket had been closed. I did not see the comment. The user filed a new ticket. We now have two.

The ticket said the homepage was broken. No URL. No browser. No screenshot. No steps. Just broken. I marked it needs more info. Nine months later it is still needs more info.

I once filed a bug against myself. I assigned it to myself. I asked myself for clarification. I marked it as blocked on me. I closed it as won't fix. The retrospective was tense.

The bug was a feature in the spec. The spec was wrong. The PM filed the bug. The PM had written the spec.

Severity is the customer's word. Priority is ours. Customer says critical. We say P3. Both are documented. Both will be cited in the postmortem.

The ticket is on the backlog. The backlog has 4,800 items. We groom it every two weeks. The grooming has been moving the same six tickets since the spring.

I once closed a ticket as fixed. The fix had not shipped. It was in a PR that had been open for a month. The reporter ran into the bug again. The reopened ticket cited my closure as a learning moment.

A ticket was duplicated as a duplicate. The duplicate was also a duplicate. The original duplicate had been closed. The duplicate of the duplicate is now the canonical ticket. Nobody can find it.

I added a comment that said I think I see what's happening. The comment was from 2021. The ticket is still open. We do not know what I had seen.

The ticket title was URGENT. The description was lowercase. The reporter was the VP. The fix took two hours. The communication took six days.

I once filed a P0. It was the wrong P0. The real P0 was a different bug, the next day. By then the team had stopped reading P0 alerts. The pager was now folklore.

The ticket has 47 comments. None of them describe the bug. They are all about ownership. The bug, in the first comment, is one sentence.

I closed a ticket as expected behavior. The reporter replied that the behavior was not expected by anyone outside the team. They were right. We reopened it. We renamed it spec gap. The spec is now under review.

Someone added the label needs design. Design added the label needs engineering. Engineering added the label needs product. Product added the label needs triage. Triage was on Thursday.

The reproducer required clicking 14 times in a specific order. The 14th click crashed the app. The fix was a one-line null check. The ticket was open for three years.

I once asked a customer for a video. They sent a 45 minute screen recording. The bug appeared in minute 38. I rewound. I confirmed. I closed the ticket as known issue. The known issue ticket had been opened in 2020.

Linear has cycles. Jira has sprints. GitHub has milestones. The bug is in none of them. The bug has been in none of them since 2021.

A bug was filed against the design system. The design system is owned by a team that does not exist anymore. The bug is now everyone's, which means it is no one's. The bug is still there. We have learned to live with it.

I once closed a ticket and the reporter sent a thank you. The thank you was a slack message. The slack message ended in a screenshot. The screenshot showed the bug was still there. They had thanked me for the comment, not the fix.

Severity 5 exists. It is for bugs that are technically wrong but nobody will ever notice. We have 800 of them. They are the team's true backlog. They will outlive the company.

The bug is in production. The staging environment does not have the bug. The staging environment is also six months behind production. The bug is the difference.

I once spent an afternoon writing a perfect reproducer. The ticket was duplicated to an existing ticket the next morning. The duplicate said see other ticket. The other ticket said cannot reproduce.

Triage assigned a bug to the wrong team. The wrong team triaged it and assigned it to a different wrong team. The bug has been triaged seven times. Each team has marked it not us. It is now the bug's tour of the org chart.

I labeled a ticket flaky. It was a real bug, intermittently. The label has been on the ticket for two years. The label is now an ownership transfer. Anyone who sees the bug ignores it. The bug is now a feature of the ticket.

A ticket title said it shouldn't do this. I asked what it was doing. I asked what it should do instead. I asked which page. The reporter answered all three questions with yes. I closed the ticket as needs more info, again.

The ticket is two years old. The PR that closed it was merged last week. The release notes will say bug fix. The bug had a name in the codebase. The name was Bob.

I once filed a ticket on a Friday at 4:45pm. Monday morning it had three comments, two labels, a priority, and an owner. None of them were mine. The ticket had outgrown me over the weekend.

There is a ticket I keep meaning to close. It has been closed once. I reopened it because I had a thought. The thought is gone. The ticket is open. It will probably outlive me.

I once added a comment that said see Slack thread. The Slack thread was in a channel that was archived a year later. The link is dead. The comment is now mystery scripture. Engineers cite it. Nobody knows what it said.

Atlassian shipped a new Jira UI. The filters I had spent six years tuning no longer work. I am rebuilding them. The tickets, of course, are unchanged.

I once asked for a postmortem on a bug. The postmortem became a ticket. The ticket became a sub-task. The sub-task became a blocker on a roadmap item. The roadmap item was deferred. The postmortem was never written.

The bug has a workaround. The workaround is documented in a Confluence page from 2020. The Confluence page links to a Slack thread. The Slack thread links to a JIRA ticket. The JIRA ticket says see Confluence.

I closed a ticket as obsolete. The component had been removed. The bug had not been fixed. The bug is no longer reachable. The bug is still there, in the code, somewhere. We call this a soft fix.

There are 14 fields on the ticket form. Only two are required. The team has agreed to fill in five. We actually fill in two. Sometimes one.

I once added a watcher to a ticket. The watcher was on PTO. They came back to 312 ticket emails. They unsubscribed from the project. The project lost its memory.

I labeled a ticket good first issue. A junior picked it up. The fix touched seven systems and required a database migration. The junior shipped it. I have stopped labeling tickets good first issue.

I once closed every ticket older than 18 months. The team called it bug bankruptcy. The customer support team called it Monday.

Linear's Cmd-K is faster than Jira's search. Jira's reports are deeper than Linear's. The team picked Jira. The individuals all use Linear's keyboard shortcuts in their muscle memory anyway. The mismatch is the new bug.

A bug is filed. A PR is opened. The PR is merged. The bug is closed. The user files the bug again the next day. The fix had not shipped. The release was held. The release notes were already drafted. The drafted release notes are now archaeology.

I once added a comment that said this is intentional. The comment was on a bug from before I joined. The comment was wrong. The bug was not intentional. The bug got promoted to a feature on my word alone. The feature is now load bearing.

I have a saved filter called my tickets. It has 89 results. Three are in progress. The rest are in a quantum state. Looking at them collapses the wavefunction into more work.

Someone asked which bug tracker we used. I said all of them. We use Jira for engineering. Linear for design. GitHub Issues for the open source repo. Trello for marketing. Notion for the staff engineering group. Email for the CEO. The CEO is the busiest tracker.

I marked a ticket as needs repro. The reporter sent a repro. I ran the repro. It worked on my machine. I closed the ticket. The reporter sent a video of the repro failing on their machine. I had not asked about their machine. The bug was their browser, from 2017.

The estimate on the ticket was 2 points. The fix took three weeks. The retrospective said estimates were aspirational. The next sprint had a ticket with the same shape. It was estimated at 2 points. We have learned nothing. We are at peace.

I once filed a ticket called the website is slow. The ticket is now an epic. The epic has 47 sub-tasks. The website is still slow. The epic has its own steering committee.

Two reporters filed the same bug independently on the same day. The first reporter was thanked. The second was marked as duplicate. The second was the one who had written the affected code. The dedup is technically correct. The blame is misallocated.

I once added a custom field called actual root cause. It has been filled in twice across 4,000 tickets. Both times by me. Both wrong. I am the only consumer of the field. I have not deleted it. It is a monument.

The ticket I opened a month ago is closed. The closing comment says fixed in main. The fix is not in main. Main has not been deployed in a week. The bug is still in production. The ticket, however, is closed.