I haven’t been as active writing on this forum as I hoped I’d be. A large part of the reason for this is that I have prioritized other things than writing when I have time away from work. But another important part has been the problem to come up with things meaningful enough to write about. I have dismissed a lot of topics that I have thought to be too obvious to write about. The other day I started to think that perhaps I was wrong.

I’ve introduced sprints in my current project. A sprint runs for a fixed amount of time (in our case two weeks). During that time the team delivers an increment of functionality. The sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting. A big part of this meeting is that the team decides for itself how much of the highest priority functionality will be delivered at the end of the sprint. This is natural as it is the team that is supposed to do the job. The members are the ones who know what it takes. They are best suited to make the decisions. Well, at least I thought that was obvious.

One of the managers in the organization took me aside one day and asked me with a concerned look how I would make sure that the team took on enough work. If the leads of the project don’t push the team to take on more things to do, how can we get them to work fast enough?

I firmly believe that all teams will do its very best at all times. With a team of highly skilled, well trained, and motivated people, why would you need someone to push them to take on more work? On the contrary, most teams seem to over commit in the beginning, wanting to take on more work than they are capable of.

We ask a lot of our developers nowadays. They are not only supposed to just make the code work. They’re supposed to write unit tests, write integration tests, refactor the code, communicate with product owners, communicate with testers, communicate with other developers, and make sure that their changes don’t break anyone else’s code.

What do you get when you push those developers to squeeze some more work in so that we can make the project deadline? Most of the stuff above will be skipped and we will be back to trying to just making it work. In the short term it will look like we’re moving faster, but the lack of quality measurements will sooner or later come back to haunt us. Additions and changes will become harder and harder. Adding tests will be harder and harder. Meeting deadlines will be harder and harder. Skipping anything but just writing code will look more and more tempting.

I thought this was obvious. Isn’t it?