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> I can’t stop everything and clean up. As much as I would like to, I have a deadline. In my experience, if this way of thinking has become institutionalized y

> I can’t stop everything and clean up. As much as I would like to, I have a deadline. In my experience, if this way of thinking has become institutionalized you have bad leadership. It is literally unsustainable to constantly develop without any aftercare or clean up. It doesn't matter if it is on the Product or Platform side. The best solution I have found starts with leadership. Leadership understands the idea of building codes and does understand this concept as applied to software. I have found that when quality standards are agreed by all teams and supported by leadership, a lot of the inter-team friction falls away.

narwally 5y ago
This lines up with my experience as well. At worst, you should be able to work solely on getting your sprint tasks done, but also be making notes of any clean-up/aftercare that needs to be done and any other basic codebase maintenance that you notice as well. Then these get added as future sprint tasks. In the best team I worked on all of our sprint tasks had soft deadlines unless explicitly stated. So it was perfectly justifiable to not fully complete a sprint task because you needed to do some unforeseen codebase maintenance in that part of the project before you could get to work. before I got there, the team had inherited a python2 project that hadn't been fully maintained in a while. Our pm always emphasized to "clean up your workplace before and after every task". Adhering to that, we were able to prepare for a migration to python3, add tests and documentation, and enforce pep8; all while implementing new features and setting up a continuous delivery system.