Maintenance vs New Development

Blogoverse is awesome! Here everything I say is the truth, because there are no counter arguments. In reality it's not always that easy to get people convinced. :)

I'm giving here an example situation and my opinion for a solution. The readers are more than welcome to offer their opinions and join the discussion.

Our releases are planned in cadence. Teams craft their own objectives which we call simply Release Plans. Then the Release Train Engineer (which is me) gathers those so anyone in the organization can quickly get an idea of what will come most probably is coming out in the next Release. The Release Plan is a list of features and changes to the software that we predict to be ready by the next Release Day.

Now, depending on the magnitude of technical debt, maintenance burden, customer contacts and possible fire-fighting issues, some teams have a lot less capacity for developing new features. It can be that over half of their time is usually spent on something else than new features. Like fixing bugs or refactoring. Taking into account all the facts, that's ok.

Somewhat due to misunderstanding and also because it doesn't feel nice to present an empty Release Plan, the teams urge to have also the maintenance issues in their Release Plan. This would make it easier to communicate why they are not able to create so much new business value. Seeing how some people have failed to understand the difference between Release Plan and what activities the teams are doing during the release period, this seems like a valid point.

But personally I find this to be a dysfunction. I think it's the team's choice anyway how they spend their time. And since we have all the maintenance issues in our Product Backlog, the people who are interested in what's happening in the team's daily work can check the situation there. Or participate in the Sprint Reviews. Or go and have a chat with the team or just look at things are going. There's no lack of transparency, people just need to go and have a look.

I see an analogy between this and the work of individual team members in a Sprint. For me the essence of Agile software development is that we have skilled and disciplined individuals who are the best judges of how to do their work (and spend their time). No-one should be micro-managing them and telling how to do their job. It's an issue of responsibility. And trust. If you are more into waterfall, go get yourself a Project Manager. ;)

But as the Scrum Master is educating and coaching the team, I find myself responsible for educating the organization. Don't worry, I'll do my best. Challenges make life interesting!