I had the pleasure of trying to work on 3 separate agile projects last sprint. I typically get 40-50 story points done in a sprint. I like to take on more than I think I can do to keep myself from letting work expand to fill time. I also had the issue of having to take on another developer’s work. Total, we promised ~80 story points. <\/p>\n
Now, when my kid was new and I wasn’t allowed to sleep nights, I was able to cram 70-80 sps into a sprint. But sleep has made that level of productivity very hard. <\/p>\n
I was also tasked with working offsite, organizing a community of practice, and trying to learn a very large project through “osmosis”. Which is to say, learn as much as you can without reporting time spent on it. <\/p>\n
I have to admit, all of the work is interesting and the clients are all people I personally don’t want to let down. So it’s hard to say “forget project X”. (Which is hard to say generally when there actually is a project X.) <\/p>\n
So with many things pulling me in many directions, my completed story points for the sprint was 33. A significant decrease in general productivity. <\/p>\n
Context switching needs to be allocated for in sprint planning. Duh?<\/p>\n
The trick is how much? Some people say it takes 15-30 min to effectively context switch. That’s part of it. I think the larger part is when you’re focused on one-two items, you can finish things effectively. The more items, the more you end up with partial work. Partial work is the worst time killer. You get 50% into a feature and if you have to stop and start again it magically turns into 30-40% done. <\/p>\n
Solution? Don’t switch contexts.<\/p>\n
Har har. Work on something to completion before switching contexts. Be strict about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had the pleasure of trying to work on 3 separate agile projects last sprint. I typically get 40-50 story points done in a sprint. I like to take on more than I think I can do to keep myself from letting work expand to fill time. I also had the issue of having to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4571,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64017,63924,910,64008,64033,63928],"tags":[63996,64040],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile-development","category-atg","category-development","category-flashcards","category-harmony-lab","category-quizmo-atg","tag-agile","tag-context-switching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4571"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}