Slack time in engineering scheduling

via Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel: Every time I mention slack time as one of the most important things for healthy engineering teams people look at me as if they’re seeing water burning.

(Important: We don’t mean Slack as in the messaging app!)

That doesn’t make it any less true though. Here’s a brief note by Martin Fowler on the topic:

Martin Fowler: Slack

A common approach with Timeboxed Iterations is to allocate as many UserStories as possible to each iteration in order to maximize the utilization of the staff involved. Slack is the policy of deliberately leaving time that isn’t allocated for stories, using that time for unplanned work. Although this seems inefficient, it usually yields a significant improvement for the productivity of a team.

(My take: Engineers – and their managers (I am one) – are habitually over-ambitious. There is sense in this post. See also the follow-on discussion from Alper’s Mastodon post.)