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How to organize software support team in an open source project

Last post 12:58 pm May 3, 2017 by Ian Mitchell
1 reply
dolevo jay
08:04 am April 26, 2017

Dear all,

We have a successful open source project, which we have just started selling licences for commercial users. As you can guess, we have also started getting support tickets (which is in the end a paid service). I am the leader of the team and we are about 6 developers (now mixed support and development). The development tasks are clearly described in the backlog and the scope is clear. Therefore, we can perfectly apply scrum. No problem here. However, the same people need to fix support tickets too. As you can imagine, the number of support tickets are not fixed and varies day to day and this makes our life hard. The problem is, sometimes the developers are fully busy with support tickets and have no time to finish the tasks in sprint (for development). Therefore, the velocity varies a lot. I was wondering if there is a similar example around and would like to know how I should set this team up.

Any idea or question is welcome.

Thanks

Ian Mitchell
12:58 pm May 3, 2017

Why not alternate between product development work in one sprint and support work in another? That would allow the team to focus on and commit to the respective Sprint Goals.

If support work pre-empts a team's plan, so that focus and commitment on a Sprint Goal are compromised, then the team's implementation of Scrum is not likely to be successful.

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