From the course: Agile Foundations
Stay within timeboxes
- Agile teams focus on being predictable instead of creating detailed plans. Most organizations create detailed plans because they're trying to eliminate uncertainty, but agile teams can actually do a better job eliminating uncertainty by delivering predictably every few weeks. The Agile Manifesto points this out in Principles 3 and 8. It said that agile teams deliver working software frequently with a preference for the shorter timescale, and that developers should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely, so developers should be able to deliver frequently and indefinitely at a constant pace. Now, also remember that agile teams embrace change and are free to experiment, so your teams need to be able to experiment, change, while at the same time delivering frequently and indefinitely. If you stop for a minute, that sounds really hard to do. It almost sounds like painting a bus as it's driving down the road, while at the same time guaranteeing that you'll be on time at every stop. That's why the best way to do this is by working with small batches of work and delivering it frequently. Agile teams should be very aware of time. You can't have meetings that go over schedule or brainstorming sessions with an uncertain outcome. That's because your team has a deadline every few weeks. These are usually called sprints. That's also why agile teams are very structured with their time. Typically, they'll use the term time box. This is like a box of time that can't expand. That means that if your meeting is scheduled for 45 minutes, then the meeting will end in 45 minutes. Whatever your team decides within that time box will be the final outcome. Think about how many times you're in a meeting and nothing gets decided. Usually what happens is that a project manager will schedule another meeting. That should never happen with an agile team because if you take that time away for another meeting, then you can put the team in danger of not delivering within the sprint. Now, a time box is more than just about meetings. Each person on an agile team has their own personal time box. They shouldn't work more than eight hours a day. If team members start putting in overtime or working over the weekends, then it can interfere with the team's predictability. This extra time isn't considered a sustainable pace. A scrum team will work in sprints. That's also a time box. A typical box of time is two weeks, so that means that your team will deliver whatever is finished in two weeks. If you just need an extra day to finish the database, then you have to take that feature out of the sprint. Keep in mind that you need a time box to deliver predictably. You can't commit to a delivery date if you have too much work, or if your meetings go long, or if everyone is working overtime.
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