Re: [PLUG] Agile Methods for SysAdmins?

I think you’re right that Kanban would be a better fit for your work.

In terms of sprint commitment, you should incorporate the time you expect to spend fighting fires in your capacity planning. For example, if you spend half your time on those interruptions, then plan to only spend half the sprint completing your stories.

If you find yourself spending too much time fighting fires and not enough completing stories, flag that to your scrum master/PM/PO and your engineering leadership. Identify improvements that would reduce the need for firefighting and estimate how much you could reduce that toil. Then, you can weigh that tech debt against the priority of new stories.

For example, “We could complete 2 extra stories a week if we took 3 days to make that system more resilient.” Making the trade offs explicit helps your leadership make better informed choices on what you work on.

I highly recommend reading the Site Reliability Engineering book. It covers these topics in detail, and it’s super useful.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 20:10 Tone Montone <tonemontone@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone currently use Agile Methodologies as System Admins/Engineers?

I ask because a few months a company I work for introduced it, but I don't think we are doing it well.

We use Jira, we use Scrums, but as Admins, they don't seem to fit into our work life. I feel we could do better with Kanban, as we can pull from a list of work that is required to support our products. However, since most people think Scrum when they think of Agile, it's a hard sell. Especially since I don't have much experience in either.

In Agile, we create stories that we think we could complete in two weeks, but they are either not completed in time, or not held to our commitments, as often fires or other issues arise and the tasks get moved back to backlog or simply closed.

In Kanban, we could build a backlog of tasks that are needed, then prioritize them. Then move them to "To Do" phase when needed. People could pull from the ToDo column and move them to "In Progress", and work them until "Done". The time constraints would be gone, and the Scrum meetings would be gone... not sure what replaces them.

Just wondering if anyone works in an Agile way, what works, what doesn't, and what intelligence they glean from it. i.e. Does it work for you?

Thanks,

Mike
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