How to handle legacy project maintenance with Scrum

Question

My company is experimenting Scrum and we are currently building a new product. Often we have to do some maintenance in legacy projects and as their Scrum Master I'm puzzled how handle this inside the Sprint.

Should we wait for the end of the Sprint and make a new short iteration for the legacy projects?

Is it bad to have "parallel work" and allocate a single developer to solve the problem and do the maintenance?

Obs: my team currently has 4 developers only.

Edit:

Forgot to say: the maintenance and main project are separated and completely different.

How much % of time is going to maintenance? – Sep 22 '13 at 16:26 — , Sep 22 '13 at 16:26
It varies a lot, but usually 10~20% of the time. – davigbr Sep 22 '13 at 17:06 — davigbr, Sep 22 '13 at 17:06

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 22 '13 at 18:16

The way I understand your situation is as follows:

There is effectively no link between the maintenance work and the new development.
The amount of maintenance is relatively small. (you say <=20%)

Of course you can schedule the work as part of the scrum, but that would create an artificial deadline for the maintenance work. Also, the maintenance is only relevant for a part of the team. So in your case, I would keep it out of the scrum planning. You can correct the availability of your team for the estimated amount of maintenance work, just like you would do if your team members have other tasks, or are on vacation or whatever.

This is of course important when you want to accurately predict your team's productivity.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 22 '13 at 16:48

1

Add the maintenance work to the Product Backlog and prioritize it along with all the other project work. This way you ensure that the highest priority work always gets done first.

answered Sep 22 '13 at 16:48

Derek Davidson PST CST

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I forgot to say, but the problem is that the maintenance work is separated from the main project. They are completely different matters. Won't it cause some overhead for the developers to switch between the two projects? – davigbr Sep 22 '13 at 17:03
1

@davigbr Yes, indeed it will. If you're asking one Scrum Team to work on multiple Products, you will suffer from task switching (always harmful to productivity) and lose some of the benefits of Scrum because of this. As there is no contention for priority between the two projects, I'd be inclined to manage the maintenance wholly separately, perhaps using Kanban. – Derek Davidson PST CST Sep 23 '13 at 11:40

How to handle legacy project maintenance with Scrum

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