Informal Labor Plan

If developers need to do the most important thing now, then let them negotiate among themselves or "just figure out the right thing to do" as regards short term plans, instead of master planning. undefined

To be applied before

 * Development Episode, Get On With It and Work Queue are inputs for Informal Labor Plan.

To be applied after

 * continued Informal Labor Plan leads to Developer Controls Process.

Alternatives

 * Interrupts Unjam Blocking is an alternative to Informal Labor Plan.
 * see also Programming Episode.

Contents of following sections belong to the original Organizational Patterns website and have been divided into following parts: Context, Problem, Solution, Discussion.

Context
... real development requires developers to work on several parallel tasks such as Development Episodes that may have interdependent or even conflicting priorities and due dates.

Problem
A schedule of developer work tasks can both assist workers in planning their time, and ensure stakeholders about scheduling expectations. The Development Episode presents an ideal that must be worked into the lives of people trying to get a big job done quickly. Developers will often find themselves obligated to more than one in progress Development Episode at a time. The Work Queue offers one prioritizing, though one that ignores the many small trade-offs possible when the work is at hand.

Solution
Let individuals devise their own short-term plans. Accept that much of the group activity implied in a Development Episode will take place pair-wise between group members that find the time to tackle some issue together (Developing In Pairs). Avoid the temptation to call a meeting where a developmental climax is intended to happen. It won’t. Instead let individuals express interests and make commitments to each other. And let them revise these intentions on a moment’s notice when the energy of some episode reaches an irresistible level.

Note that this means that there is a threshold of detail below which a project manager should not track. The threshold may vary depending on the project, but it is a safe bet that tasks smaller than a few days should not be formally tracked. One might get a sense of excess detail by the amount of complaining the developers do about the relevance of the tracking.

Discussion
This leads to an organization where the Developer Controls Process. Not only does the developer suggest the overall structure of commitments, but the developer becomes the focal point for day-today priority calls.

A Development Episode is actually composed of a series of Programming Episodes, some of which must take place in (at least) pairs if any approximation of group consciousness is to form. An individual’s labor plan is his tool to make these connections happen. Pair Programming Facilities [Beck1999] are configurations of the physical environment that can reduce this planning to an occasional Hallway Chatter promise.