Does this feel sustainable?

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

- The Principles of the Agile Manifesto

I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of sustainability. In fact, you could say it's a major theme of my writing on this very blog.

Below are some unsustainable practices I've covered in the last few years, with links to my writing on them.

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We've been collecting paychecks for several months without delivering a valuable feature to a real user.

• Maximize the Amount of Work Not Done
• Breaking Work Into Chunks That Users Care About
• Continuous Delivery and Management Pathologies

We complain often about the need for improvement in our processes, but we don't make time for the work or hold anyone accountable.

• Retro Grade

We're paying highly-trained technical experts to do tedious, manual tasks that a computer could do.

• Discipline Is a Limited Resource
• My Job Went to the Cloud
• Be the Automator

We're pulling our hair out trying to forecast release dates, and working overtime to fit in all the work.

• How Do I Convert Story Points to Hours?
• The Psychology of Story Points

The QA people never have enough time to test all the code the developers are writing by the end of the sprint.

• Quality Assistance

We're rushing to meet deadlines, and we insist on getting every detail right the first time.

• Don't Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed
• Opportunistic Programming

We're slowing down the delivery of features to do code reviews of every commit, but the code quality is still low and we have tons of bugs.

• Small Diffs and Code Reviews
• Keep Code Reviews Focused on the Code