What Is a Sustainable Pace?
Sustainable Pace is a software development approach that ensures a consistent pace of work over time, even in a fast-paced environment meaning that development teams can maintain their energy and productivity levels despite tight deadlines and high-pressure situations. Development projects involve repeated iterations, some of which run longer than others. The most likely scenario is that a new project begins while the previous one is immediately closed. This can overwhelm professional developers if they do not continuously maintain their energy level throughout projects.
The sustainable pace should be maintained at all stages of development:
- Developing
- QA
- Delivery management.
Maintaining a sustainable pace is a sure way to stay on schedule for planned releases and iterations. It prevents the business from falling into a death march.
It is difficult to pinpoint the optimal pace for a development team, so it is much safer to have short periods of thirty minutes of intense activity followed by five-minute breaks. After every four periods of exertion and rest, the team should take a longer break of thirty minutes to recharge. Other factors to consider when implementing a sustainable work pace in a fast-paced work environment include observing meal breaks and ensuring that team members have the support they need to maintain their energy and focus. Toilet and meal breaks should be observed. These factors should be considered when implementing a sustainable work pace in an extreme programming environment.
Sustainable development
The company's core values should not be compromised. The company's reputation should dictate the consistent speed and productivity of iterations.
Sustainable quality
The final product of an iteration should incur little to no technical debt. An ideal process should not accumulate such liabilities with each product increment.
Sustainable delivery
Releases should meet and maintain the planned schedule for delivery to production and test environments. Stability and consistency are critical to maintaining appropriate frequency.
Sustained improvement
Course corrections, introspection, and feedback from reviews should be used to continuously improve development practices and processes.
What Is a Sustainable Pace in Scrum?
Agile processes promote sustainable development. Sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a steady pace indefinitely.
The Scrum Guide doesn't mention sustainable pace. But it does put the power to decide what will be done in the next sprint firmly in the hands of the development team.
Scrum says quality goals shouldn't change during a sprint. And you'll see later how quality suffers from speed. So, working at a sustainable pace is implicit in Scrum and under the development team's control.
Product Owner
- Don't make commitments to the business that don't originate with the development team.
- Don't expect the development team to make commitments for longer than the upcoming sprint.
- All priorities are set by the product owner... respect that.
- Remember the cone of uncertainty when developing your product roadmap.
Development Team
- Beware of estimating what you can get done in a sprint by making initial estimates based on velocity, rather than taking the time to break down stories into actionable work (this is why sprint planning has the longest timeframe of any meeting event)
- If you include too many backlog items in the sprint backlog, you jeopardize time for creative solutions, cross-training skills between team members, and worst of all, the temptation to accept lower quality for the product increment.
- Remember that if you underestimate, you can always work with the Product Owner to bring in the next higher priority later in the Sprint, assuming that all of the original Sprint Backlog items met the definition of "done" and could be released to production.
Scrum Master
- If you see the team feeling overwhelmed, ask them about it in the retrospective. Make sure there's no external pressure on the team.
- Habitual or frequent overtime indicates a problem that you should investigate and remove as a barrier to the health of the team.
Conclusion
There are numerous studies that confirm that a sustainable work pace is the most productive way to work.
So slow down your pace, focus on the tasks that bring the most value, and get them done. Your productivity will skyrocket.
