How to keep delivering features while doing production support ?
We’ve never been really good at delivering features and reducing the number of bugs at the same time. We either delayed projects, or made our customer unsatisfied. This story explains our attempt at managing both better.
How was it before?
We used to have all developers focus each 1st day of the sprint on bug fixing. The rest of the week they would focus on the project implementation.
On Monday:
- the developper would address as much bugs as possible
- the support team would plan deployment and send updates to customers.
The rest of the week :
- the developper could focus on the enhancements
- the support team would manage the customer expectation and prepare the tickets for the next monday: this included doing the analysis, and having an environment with test case ready.
Why did we change?
With this organisation we sometimes had a hard time not interrupting a developper outside the Monday debug day.
Some issues required immediate remediation, and some tasks just couldn’t (prepare a demo, retrieve a log, ..). This could have been improved internally to limit interruption, but the demand was high to improve the turnaround on bugs.
We soon realised that we needed a team of developers available at any point of time.
How is it now?
We created a team of Superheroes with a some developers assigned to a specific team for a sprint.
Each sprint a predefined number of developers are assigned to the superhero team. They will have to work on all projects and be guided for priorities by the support team.
This gives both the support and project team a fixed bandwidth and makes their planning easier:
The team has been moved to have a dedicated space in the office, giving them the ability to shout, move, talk without impacting the rest of the team.
Our initial feedback
It’s been now 10 weeks with this organisation and the key changes are:
- improvements on the response time
- increased knowledge of our products: the team is exposed to all products, not only the ones in their scope.
The main challenge is to define find the right balance between project/superhero for each dev, and keep this superhero team an exciting challenge.
We’ll see if our conclusions are the same in a few months.
