Project Sharing - SUPPORT and DEVELOPMENT

Luiz Chaves

Hello,

I work in a company and we starting using JIRA since 2 months, however we have 6 solutions, 3 that are already done and we are developing 3 new others, but we share the activities with the same team. The thing is that we don't have two areas of SUPPORT and DEVELOPMENT, so on our sprint we do have bugs and task for each user. I would like to know what you guys suggest that I do, cause with this is difficult to reach our sprint goals during the week because always there new bugs from support and we cannot advance on our developing tasks.

Thank you,

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Support and development do not mix well in a Scrum approach.  

The simple line really is very simple - size and plan your sprint and any new bugs that are logged during the sprint goes into the next sprint.  You simply cannot plan a sprint if you are allowing new work into it with unknown sizes.  So you have a harsh blanket "we do not bring new work into a sprint" - by all means, prioritise bugs right at the top of the list for the next sprint, but you can't bring them into the current one.

A slight compromise is to have a look at how much resource the bugs have historically clobbered your sprint with and plan the average in as part of the sprint.  E.g. if you're doing 100 points a sprint, and bugs have been costing you about 25, then you plan your sprint at 75 points, knowing that you're going to bring in around 25 during the execution.  This makes your sprint reports a bit odd of course.

An improvement on that is to explicitly exclude the bugs from the sprint as well, which improves the numbers, but it's still meaning you have to allocate resource that you can't then use in the sprint.

Most of us separate it completely - allocate the other resources to deal with bugs and stick them in a non-Scrum project.