The Engineering Sprint

I was listening to Episode 164: Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin on SE-Radio a few days ago. It was a nice podcast and Lisa's views are very much similar to the views of hundreds of Agile experts out there. While describing the work she's currently into, she mentioned the term "Engineering Sprint".

An Engineering sprint is a 2 week long iteration every 6 months where the team tries out new tools, upgrades existing tools and tries out some new approach to do things better than the way its always done.

I really liked the idea. I do that on a regular basis. I'm always on the lookout to find new and better tools to do my work more efficiently. Nowadays, we do a lot of work - which with a little bit of thinking - can be automated and we can save ourselves a whole bunch of time. But, the team usually doesn't have time to look at the existing situation and evaluate options to make it better. It's the scrum master's responsibility to allocate enough time to each individual to make such evaluation and it is the team's responsibility to make sure they make the best of it.

I'm not asking for a 20% personal time like Google does. But, even letting the team know that such suggestions are welcome can go a long way in making things better. There are always people in the team who are bored of doing the same shitty work everyday. Let them do something different, something interesting and something which will make them more productive in future.