Applying agile techniques and running a helpdesk

Question

My team does some development, but is mainly involved in supprting an existing suite of applications. We now have an imbedded tester (and another on the way). So how can I apply agile practises in what is a purely reactive situation?

Answer 1

Even though it is purely reactive, you surely have larger requests that need to be prioritized? I am using Scrum in a support situation to help prioritizing the non-emergency work that often requires hours or days of effort. I think that Scrum in some ways fits in even better in a support situation than in development.

Answer 2

You could try to use Kanban. It is more suited for such dynamic situations than Scrum. The ultimate solution would be to use Kanban for support activities and Scrum for development, but in case you spend much less than 50% of your time for development this may be not worthed (overengineering).

Answer 3

I would start with prioritizing the issues that come in (someone from the business end should be responsible for that), making things visible (e.g. getting them up on a task board), and improving your definition of done for each task (tests, code review, etc).

Now that you have a tester with the team, it would be a good time to start some TDD and definitely start automating a lot of your tests.

Once you have some of these basics in place, you can look at either Scrum or Kanban depending on your needs. If tasks always seem to come out of the blue, Kanban is probably more appropriate as another poster suggested.

In order to be successful with Kanban, you must make sure that you have a very solid definition of done to ensure that you maintain quality throughout. Without it, you won't see the full benefit.

I would also recommend scheduling regular retrospectives to see what is working for you and where you need to improve.