Managing work — Part III — Improvements(?)
My team doesn’t do estimates, we work on tasks and we like them to be small (whatever that means).
We like to have a very short cycle time for any issue that we are creating in Jira (sigh).
Since we are not “pointing” stories, a couple of weeks ago I decided to take a look at the count of completed issues from Sprint #1 (when I joined my current team) until Sprint #41 (the one we’ve just closed).
Our Sprints are 2 calendar weeks long (no exception if there are holidays for instance) and we used them only as checkpoints.
We don’t really do Scrum, we are probably more Kanban but we don’t follow either method exactly.
A lot of things have changed since Sprint #1: people in and people out, a new team mission, positive and negative changes in our workflow, new business goals, new engineering initiatives, everybody suddenly working from home.
The only thing that is constant is change.
― Heraclitus
Nonetheless, I’ve decided to put together a column chart to show how many issues have been completed Sprint by Sprint.
Have we improved? Has our throughput increased? Are we doing more? Or are we just getting better at creating small issues?
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
― Leonardo Da Vinci
Personally I hope that we are just getting better at creating small issues; that we are moving away from working on large, slow, and complex tasks.
Looking at the trendline I would be tempted to say that we are doing more.
But I would be much happier if I could say that we are improving the way we work and that we are growing as a team.
