Re: [PLUG] Agile Methods for SysAdmins?

I've been all over the place with Agile and Kanban in a few different teams. I think it all depends on your particular team workflow. For straight sysadmin work, Kanban for sure. However, if you're the sys admin on a software team, then Agile tends to work better. Shoehorning a sysadmin team into Agile hurts, mostly for the reason you laid out. There's a lot of fire fighting, production breaks, and at the end of the sprint you have nothing to show. Did that for a while, it was terrible and it made me and my team look terrible to management, which is what product/project management is all about.

Curious why the change form whatever you were doing to Agile/Scrum/Kanban? Was your previous workflow not working?

As far as "what do we do at standup?", ezpz. If you're a sysadmin on a software team, you can find out where the code is, what needs setup for testing, new environments, any roadblocks you can move out of the way (ie, update some infra somewhere). Like said, it works well, you get to find out all the system bits that need to be in place as the code is being written, not after the sprint and you have to scramble to get something working. For Kanban, there's no point in standups or meetings unless you want them. Do you feel like your team is all over the place and not on the same page? Sure have a weekly meeting or whatever. Otherwise, don't have meetings, make life better not sitting around.

TL;DR Do Kanban, don't have meetings

-Chris T.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 8:31 PM Joshua Karstendick <joshdick@gmail.com> wrote:

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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--
Joshua Karstendick

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Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
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