Fighting fires the agile way

Mar-5-2008

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter 1 comment

Let’s face it, no matter where you work, fires flare up from time to time. Some are serious and need to be addressed, some are just smoldering and can be put off for a short time, and some are just people yelling fire when there is no fire. Some organizations are perpetually in fire drill mode and can’t break the habit. So, if you’re an agile organization and your agile teams are committed to completing their iteration tasks, how do you fight these fires without interrupting your agile teams? Even if you allow a buffer of time within your iteration planning for handling unexpected requests, you still run the risk of distracting your development teams with potentially harmful context switching.

An interesting solution may be to assemble an agile fire fighting team. Essentially, the team would be composed of developers from different project teams. The fire fighting team would be assembled for two-week iterations (synchronized with your project iterations) and team members would rotate in and out of the team. One team member would be the fire captain. The fire captain is responsible for handling fire drill requests, triaging them, prioritizing them, and working with the fire fighting team to task them out. During their rotation on the fire fighting team, team members respond to urgent requests and work on them the same way they would any other task in an iteration, committing to address them by the conclusion of the iteration. What if there are no fires to fight? Well, don’t get too excited…it’s not off to the beach for the fire fighting team. If there are no fires, team members can address defects that may exist on their current project backlogs, they can work on documentation tasks (I knew you’d love that), or they can use the time as part of their hackathon innovation allowance.

My personal preference is that organizations work as hard as they can to move beyond the fire drill mode. I think it is harmful to your development teams, reduces overall quality and value you are delivering to your customers, and ultimately it will impact you organization in a negative way. That said, if you can’t wean yourself off the fire drill mentality, consider putting together a fire fighting team.