One person per task

One of the least teamy things I see with software teams is limiting the maximum and minimum number of items of work in process – tasks, stories, whatever you call them – both to the number of developers on the team. For some reason it’s always the number of devs, never the number of product owners, customers, QAs, or deployment people. Got four devs? Then there should be four tasks in process!

This approach is surprisingly backward given that we’re all supposed to have come so far as the leaders of the Agile Fourth Industrial Revolution 2.0 that we’ve internalised and transcended Goldratt’s theory of constraints. It’s the last holdout of the old Taylorian school of management. Everybody is working full-tilt, so if anyone runs into any trouble then everybody else is too busy to help them. If what they’re doing is upstream of anybody else’s work, then they are going to be blocked too, but rather than fix the blockage they’ll pull another task because one-person-per-task at all times!

So much is this at the core of software team thinking that when I’ve suggested in informal discussions that maybe we should do something else, people are confused. Are you saying that we should have a developer who isn’t assigned to a task, just in case? What does that person do the rest of the time, play Minesweeper? As if the only alternative to “one person per task” is “one person per task but perhaps there is another person”.

One person per task has the “nobody can help” disadvantage already mentioned. In fact, people are disincentivised from helping, because their task has their name on it and your task has your name on it. Did issue #1348 miss the release train? Bob is such a drag on the team, at least Karen managed to ace her ticket. Maybe we should reevaluate who leads on the next project.

You’ll see other effects of one person per task. Code reviews fall into one of two categories: “LGTM” and “axe to grind”. Only the people who are really invested in making sure that nobody ever misses off a const keyword, or uses function() where => would suffice, will take the time to commit to code reviews. Everybody else will skim-read, look at the CI output to see if the tests pass, and get back to their own task with their own name on it as quickly as possible. This loses both the review benefit of code review, and the shared-understanding-of-the-code benefit too. Everyone only really understands the features they worked on individually, there just happens to be a big ball of those features in one repo.

Code quality suffers. Each individual is too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the saw, because there’s always a next task for each developer to do.

Everybody else has been under-resourced. We need one developer per task, because what I can see is features in a UI and the only people shovelling features are the devs. QA is a cost centre, so if we can get one QA (or at most, one per team) then let’s do that. Same with ops. Infosec, coaching, UX, and other nice-to-haves can be consultants as needed. Weird how our devs are ticking off tasks like billy-O, and nothing’s getting through to release!

The alternative to “one person per task” is not “one person per task and some change”. It’s “one objective per team”. Set the goal, and let people work out what to do about it and how everyone contributes. As they used to say, “give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”.

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.
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4 Responses to One person per task

  1. A similar disconnect happens in technical support organizations, where measured task flow drives a speed focus. Soon a team is very efficient at “closing cases”, but not solving customer problems. But the bosses bonus, and indeed their job, ride on getting that x% productivity improvement, and so nothing ever changes. .

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