Has working with software developers been a challenge at your company? Have you seen projects that consistently miss deadlines? Have you worked with developers that start out great and then slowly decline and then disappear? You may simply be dealing with a talented developer that experienced burnout on your project.
Burnout is extremely common in the software industry and is a key reason many software projects fail. Burnout can maybe best be described as symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that are connected to a given project or organization. For instance, your brain might shut off and you might become extremely anxious at the mere mention of a certain project. This is burnout. A developer in such a state will likely be unable to continue working on that project and may experience diminished productivity on their next several projects as well. Burnout can cripple careers.
There are many reasons for burnout, but the most basic reason is that it is the result of working too much, under too much stress, for too long.
It is like running a car engine at high RPMs for a very long time without adding oil or gas. Eventually that engine will break and it will be hard to put it back together.
I'm proposing a solution. It's a form of agile that's explicitly designed to help avoid burnout. I call it Agile Lite.
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The most basic rule is this: Every cycle includes a 3 week sprint and 1 week "off" where sprint planning is done. 3 weeks on/1 week off.
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A sprint contains Issues and engineers solve Issues, logging pertinent questions and updates to the Issue Tracker.
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An issue is any unit of work that should take 4-8 hours of engineering effort. An issue is either in the current sprint or in the backlog.
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Once a sprint has begun, Issues may not be added to the sprint, but they can be removed. This reduces context switching and that is a good thing.
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Any Issues in the current sprint that are not completed by the end of the sprint are reviewed during the 1 week of sprint planning.
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There is no working overtime. There can be no death marches. Engineers are put on a regular cadence of work and allowed sufficient time to recharge their brains. Management overhead is minimal.
That's pretty much the whole system. It can be modified to suit your purposes. But if there's one differentiator to Agile Lite I'd like to point out, it's that we are explicitly saying, "Hey, agile teams are burning out just as much as other development methodologies, maybe we need to build explicit rules in to prevent overheating the engine that is the engineering team."
Let's stop overheating our engines. There's plenty of work to do out there. A pit without bottom, in fact. But life is too short to spend all of it working, stressed, and ultimately burned out.
If you would like to see more workplaces implement a system such as this, please star this repo on github and share on social media to increase visibility. Dave Sullivan 2019 [email protected]