Live data from Hacker News

Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

github.com

31–40 of 292 posts

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#31

> Issues may not be added to the sprint I don't see this happening, even if that's a good rule, because issues come up that take higher priority than existing issues.

I noticed that as well. That'll be pushed back against, and the leadership is going to decided that they must respond to SOME issues to appear responsive, and let's be honest, it's going to have to happen regardless of project ideology. There'll be some silly rule put in place that only priority "X" issues get looked at mid sprint, and suddenly every issue is going to be priority "X", and now someone gets to spend the time they would have spent fixing the issue going "Ok, is this really a priority 'X' issue?" and fighting with whoever raised it.

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#33
post #26
post #8

How do you deal with a sudden bug in released version then? Or even bugs in the curent dev branch? All developers time is allocated to new features, there are no openings – so all the bugs are moved to the next spring automatically and we release with criticals? Edit: everyeone's answering with very good advice on how to handle it, but my intention was not to ask for advice for any situation I encountered personally,…

Apply the five whys. Why do you have a critical bug in the production release? Is is environment-specific? Did the released code not match requirements? Or were the requirements themselves wrong? It's not "What do you do about critical bugs?", it's "How do you stop having critical bugs so they don't disrupt your development process?" If criticals in production are a regular part of your life, then you're doing someth…

> If criticals in production are a regular part of your life, then you're doing something wrong as an organization.

I believe that may be slightly idealistic - a test case doesn't get covered by the stakeholders and suddenly once the solution is in, it suddenly pops up its ugly head. It takes a ton of self-awareness and resources for a project to know its every use before it gets to the end user.

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#34
Everyone has their own vision of what agile and/or scrum should be. Every company, manager and developer has their own special and unique recipe. There are as many flavours and variants as there are rules for playing a game of pool across the world.

Personally my main takeaway from the whole agile world is "people over process".

Sort out your communication, trust, and how you work together first. Then start looking at whether you want to work with agile, XP, scrum, kanban or some other recipe.

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#36
As others have noted, I think it's important to note the difference between Agile and Scrum. Agile is a mindset, Scrum is a framework that encapsulates a lot of Agile tenants. The ideas of a sprint or backlog or cards are purely Scrum. Agile says nothing about using these items to satisfy customers (the highest priority per the Agile Manifesto). That said, Agile principles intentionally include a note about promoting sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

TL;DR So long as you are constantly mindful of Agile tenants, there's already built in awareness around burnout and sustainable practices.

For reference: https://agilemanifesto.org, https://www.scrumguides.org/

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#37
post #14

Interesting idea. All I've experienced so far was "Agile Enterprise Edition" - cargo-culting all the agile terms, wasting developer time in overly-long standups, yet having a fixed, set-in-stone schedule and delivery plan. Hilarious.

Same here. I call it "agile waterfall" development.

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#38
post #8

How do you deal with a sudden bug in released version then? Or even bugs in the curent dev branch? All developers time is allocated to new features, there are no openings – so all the bugs are moved to the next spring automatically and we release with criticals? Edit: everyeone's answering with very good advice on how to handle it, but my intention was not to ask for advice for any situation I encountered personally,…

I've seen this handled a few different ways. What you do is going to depend on the size of your team and your current business context. Like the rest of engineering, there are few hard and fast rules, you have to weigh the trade-offs.

One approach is to prioritize all bugs before all features. This is the Joel Spolsky approach. In a typical sprint-based environment, this basically means that available work effort is allocated to bugs, and only remaining work effort is allocated to new features. The Google SRE model (as I understand it) tries to moderate this by basically saying the team has some flexibility in work allocation between bugs/features unless certain SLOs are missed. When that happens, you go full Spolsky.

But that doesn't really address the "what if a critical bug comes up mid-sprint". To address that, you basically adopt an on-call support model. Each sprint, one (or more, or a half, etc.) are assigned to be the support person. They triage any issues or bugs and address them as best as possible. It really helps if there is a rotation, just like your operations on-call rotation. In fact, it's best if you view this as the "escalation level" from your operational on-call rotation. You can provide a similar resource for marketing or other kinds of events as necessary. The benefit is that you have an up-front acknowledgement of the level of investment needed for responsiveness, as well as being able to provide folks with periods of interruption vs. periods of deep work, and share that burden.

Lastly, I think it's really important to separate "release" from "sprint completion", especially in a SaaS environment. If you build your CI/CD and release processes around releasing at the end of the sprint, you end up building a very inflexible infrastructure. It's much better if you can release often, as work is completed. So, if you have a small feature ticket and you tackle it early in the sprint, ship it right away. If a bug comes up, release the fix as soon as it's available. I've been on too many teams where you have an inflexible release process tied to the sprint. When something comes up, it interrupts the whole flow to get something done. So, "end of sprint" != "big release".

Re: Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout

#39
post #29

If you're getting burnout doing agile, you're doing agile wrong. Don't do sprints. Have a continuous backlog. Don't do overtime. Don't make estimates. Always do the simplest thing. Only ever do the most important thing, as defined by the stakeholder. I've written and talked about this at great length. The fact people suggest agile gives you burnout reinforces my experience that Scrum is largely misinterpreted and peo…

Scrum is a framework to achieve "agility" and people forget that. The point is agility, not scrum.

Indeed, and the Scrum-Industrial Complex has vested interests in codifying a certain format that it can sell.
Post reply on HN