> Craig moved the organization onto a sprint system, where we would develop new features for 2 weeks and then spend a week fixing bugs. After 10 or 12 or 16 of these cycles, we would deem it ready and ship it out.
I felt this produced more stable but more conservative software. It seemed like giant rewrites and massive features would be very difficult to introduce and if they did get done, wouldn't happen until two thirds or so into the release cycle.
I've noticed this problem too in Agile shops. Small iterations happen fast on well scheduled. But big new efforts tend to be like swimming up-river. Whatever comes after Agile is probably going to formalize a long-track parallel cadence for a dedicated team to grind away on. Then once that's released it goes into the normal sprint cadence.
It seems to usually be "solved" right now by lots of weeping, halting production and blowing up of anybody else's schedule.
> I've noticed this problem too in Agile shops. Small iterations happen fast on well scheduled. But big new efforts tend to be like swimming up-river. Whatever comes after Agile is probably going to formalize a long-track parallel cadence for a dedicated team to grind away on.
That seems to be a not-that-uncommon practice in Agile/Lean environments with the resources to implement it already (you don't see a lot of coverage of it in books about "Agile" software methods specifically, though I've seen considerable coverage of it in "Lean" software development books -- which tend to address the kind of pragmatic metamethodology the Agile manifesto calls for, while "Agile" books, ironically, tend to focus on more on narrow prescriptive methodologies, particularly Scrum and close variants.)
The immediate and longer-term (or multiple potential solutions with different risk profiles without a strict "this one is for now, this one is the long term objective solution" division) in parallel thing that Google has done in lots of areas for a long time (and people outside often question with "why is Google doing both X and Y when they have overlapping use cases".)
I've noticed this problem too in Agile shops. Small iterations happen fast on well scheduled. But big new efforts tend to be like swimming up-river. Whatever comes after Agile is probably going to formalize a long-track parallel cadence for a dedicated team to grind away on. Then once that's released it goes into the normal sprint cadence.
It seems to usually be "solved" right now by lots of weeping, halting production and blowing up of anybody else's schedule.