Our company moved to Scrum recently on a product that was almost coded by a single person (Joe). We have support to do with our exising customers that we try to integrate in our process.
For now we tried the following approach:
- We do a rotation on a person in charge each week.
- The person in charge for the week may spend up to 8 hours on support.
But we failed to have it work:
- Joe always does the support because he knows the code better, and it's always faster for him to do it than to explain it.
- We (the rest of us) tend to focus on what's on the Sprint board aka new stories instead of support tasks.
- Joe has too much work, he can't handle all the support by himself because he has to do things outside of the Sprint as well.
Have you already faced similar situation? How did you manage to get out of it?
Note: We can't dedicate a single person on the support right now. We hope to in the future.
Best Answer
We took a very similar approach by designating a "Support Programmer" that rotated through the more junior (or newest) developers on the team. They were encouraged to try really hard to figure out the problem before asking the other developers even if it would be faster to kick it over to the developer who knew the code best. This way they were forced to learn the codebase and you avoided knocking people out of "the zone" and destroying productivity. Also, you have to build in some mechanism to keep people from doing an end-around to the non-support programmers to make this work.
A key point is that the team needs to understand that what may be the fastest way to close support issues is not always the most efficient use of the team's time. Make sure the entire team knows that the goal of this structure is to minimize interruptions to people who are in that productive mode at all costs.
That said, the support programmer was not 100% dedicated to support calls. They did work on cases in the sprint, but were supposed to work on the lowest priority items so that if they got hung up on a lot of support issues the fact that they didn't finish their cases wouldn't be such a major concern.