Sustainable pace is the rate of work that a team can consistently maintain
without burning out team members. This concept was popularized by the Extreme
Programming (XP) methodology with its 40-hour work week practice, which later
evolved into the more generic "sustainable pace." The basic idea is that,
although a team can have brief spurts of overtime (perhaps for a week or two at
a time during critical periods during a project lifecycle), it cannot maintain
that pace indefinitely. This is analogous to the concept that you cannot
sprint throughout a marathon.
Strategies to help maintain a sustainable pace:
- Build activities into everyday work. This avoids the
problem that the activity is scheduled into a specific period and, therefore,
must be accomplished regardless of how much effort it requires. For example,
instead of leaving testing to the end of a project, test all the way through
the project. Instead of modeling only at the beginning of a project,
model all the way through only when you need the relevant information and
only to the extent that you currently need.
- Organize the project into short iterations. Short
iterations provide the opportunity for small "pebbles" (which show progress)
rather than huge "milestones." Continuous feedback reduces the need to
work long hours. Also, it helps focus on finding ways to consistently
achieve the regular deliveries.
- Adopt a continuous integration strategy. By frequently
merging code, compiling it, testing it, and running appropriate code analysis
against it, you increase the quality of your work through finding and then
fixing defects quickly and easily. This reduces the chance of major problems
in your work, thereby reducing a primary motivator of unexpected overtime.
- Question long hours. Productivity does not increase
with hours worked. Tired people are far less productive than well-rested
ones.
- Recognize sustained overtime as a failure. If a team
needs to work overtime for more than two weeks in a row, that is a reflection
of poor planning or inadequate resources allocation.
- Recognize that you're still working hard at a sustainable pace. Just
because you are working at a sustainable pace, it doesn't mean that the
team is not working hard enough. Rather, it is typically an indication
that the team is a "well-oiled machine."
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