engineering-management

Slow down to improve

“Agile teams are largely unaware of the benefits of not advancing an activity. I recently asked a team I was coaching to imagine the slowest possible way they could fix a high-priority defect. While the initial response was one of bewilderment, what emerged was a higher-quality process than the one that the team was currently following. This team went on to formally publicise their slow version as what would constitute a “good defect fix”, a process that included test automation, code review, and refactoring of legacy code. They were genuinely amazed at how much their defect-fixing process improved because of having explicit permission to consider a slower fix rather than a quicker one.”

Activity

  1. Do a warm up task
  2. Ask all team members to identify and write down on a post-it something that has led to defects/bugs or rework [5 minutes]
  3. Use dot voting to prioritize items and take first one* [5 minutes]
  4. Take 15 minutes to complete the above task
  5. Use 5 minutes to take an action forward to document and implement in next sprint

*Keep remaining items for a future retrospective – but do allow time to come up with new ones