Morning all.
I’m just wanting to canvas some opinion, or experience, on your products and whether you ever have iterations for a bit of “time out”.
By this I mean where a focus specifically may be on bug fixing, chance to get artefacts such as documents up to date, catch up with some automated tests etc, maybe a bit of spit and polish etc rather than adding new features.
Do you have these in a set pattern 1/x iterations etc?
Trying to gauge how wide spread something like this might be
Paul, dunno where you work, but that, kind of time only happens in waterfall companies ? Like when after the release party everyone start booking leave and a skeleton crew keep the lights on for 2 weeks and afterwards it’s just planning meetings wall-to-wall when people get back. And in order to get out of sitting in boring meetings, developers tackle tech-debt just as an avoidance tactic.
Patterns, yeah, every company has a “bug-fixes only” release once a year, and every company follows that up with a “tech-debt only” at some point once a year. Is that what you mean by “1/iterations” . Personally I am not sure that spending time polishing is all that healthy especially if the thing you polish merely creates inertia for the turd to keep on travelling in the same direction more smoothly.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but miss-communication is my superpower, and time out is what those 25 days of leave a year are for. You are not responsible for the product, you are not really the bacon, and nor is the “chicken” responsible for that matter.
I haven’t experienced that pattern in ‘every company’, I have seen that some do it.
This!
In companies where I’ve seen this, it was during major holidays, and mass team vacations within the same 1-2 iterations(about once a year as Conrad mentions). The target was one small feature, maintenance, technical support, then at the lead developer’s choice: bug fixes or tech debt.
If the tester would make some strong bug advocacy, more bugs might be fixed. If the developers would make a strong advocacy for a crumbling part of the software, it would take priority.