{"id":175,"date":"2007-09-28T00:36:09","date_gmt":"2007-09-28T04:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken\/2007\/09\/28\/focus-and-variety\/"},"modified":"2010-09-06T06:26:37","modified_gmt":"2010-09-06T10:26:37","slug":"focus-and-variety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/focus-and-variety\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus and Variety"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/09\/blurcoaster.png\" alt='BlurCoaster by Kjudy'  title='BlurCoaster by Kjudy' \/><\/p>\n<p>We have seven developers growing to eight. The team is funded from two P&#038;L&#8217;s so from the outside we&#8217;re considered two teams. We work on two projects at a time, one from each P&#038;L.<\/p>\n<p>We used to run one backlog with developers pulling stories from either project. In the sweet spot where both projects ran smoothly this was great. <a href=\"http:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/two-product-backlogs-one-sprint\/\">But that proved short-lived<\/a>. Churn in one project slowed the other and context switching took a toll on the team.<\/p>\n<p>So we split the work into two backlogs. Everyone sits in the same room but developers are &#8220;assigned&#8221; to one project. <em>As a side note, I actually planned on having two rooms but the team said &#8220;no&#8221;.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This change has created more focus. Developers know what they&#8217;re working on, churn in one project has less effect on the other. The Scrum is easier to run, plan and track and progress appears more regular.<\/p>\n<p>The change is a qualified success. Four may be too small for sustainable pairing. If anyone goes on vacation or is sick, the pairing practice starts to break altogether.<\/p>\n<p>So to retain the focus of two small teams but gain the benefits one slightly larger one, we&#8217;ve loosened the assignments. Developers are asked to work on a specific project but they can switch if they feel <em>the hate<\/em>. The leads can switch people as well.<\/p>\n<p>Management is often about embracing contradiction. We need to find our way to both variety and focus. It&#8217;s all a work in progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have seven developers growing to eight. The team is funded from two P&#038;L&#8217;s so from the outside we&#8217;re considered two teams. We work on two projects at a time, one from each P&#038;L. We used to run one backlog &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/focus-and-variety\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[878],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scrum","tag-scrum"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/09\/blurcoaster.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2247,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/2247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykat.com\/ken-judy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}