The Maintenance First Sprint

290 words | ~1.5 min read

If you don’t schedule your maintenance, your machine will schedule it for you. And that applies regardless of the type of machine, including you! Leftover Maintenance becomes unplanned work. You catch the flu or maybe a machine breaks. Either way you’re stuck holding the bag.

We ought to put First Things First. You can delay Maintenance, sure. But it comes due with interest. By contrast, simple daily maintenance is cheap, like brushing your teeth. But if you don’t do it first thing, you will likely forget.

But like any habit change, getting the new one to stick is tricky. Start with a small experiment, and try a bunch of them. Start with identifying what is ‘maintenance’. For a developer, it could be documentation, or package updates, or adding missing tests. For a leader, it might be clearing thru your email backlog. It might mean journaling, or inspecting your systems.

Once you know what it looks like, it’s a simple matter of scheduling. For a developer or team, schedule a 1-2 hour block right after Sprint Planning. Do the maintenance work, and get it merged. Then go back to regular development. Even if it’s just one document, just one test, or just one package. You left the app in a little better state.

If you want to take a more aggressive approach, you can. For a leader that might mean booking the first 30min of every day for the next week. Assigning each a Maintenance task (Journal, Inbox-0, System Check). And then actually sticking to that commitment.

The pattern remains the same. What goes first, gets done. And it doesn’t have to be expensive or heavy. Little and often make much. Start building the sustainable habit.