Chapter 8. Sustained engineering

By James Waletzky

Most teams that release a product or service to customers perform software maintenance after release. An effective team minimizes defects during development, but some level of post-ship fixes are inevitable. This situation poses problems even for a mature team in its need to prioritize and schedule unplanned maintenance work in conjunction with developing product road map features (new development). What is an effective model for dealing with this distraction from new feature development, hereafter known as “sustained engineering” (SE)? I’m sure you already guessed—Kanban.

The model I recommend for using Kanban to address post-release defects has several aspects. The teams involved need to define ...

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