Engineering-led Research Tickets

One of my optimistic beliefs about software engineers is that we're full of good ideas about how things around us could be improved. We're smart people, problem solvers. We read tech news, we're friends with engineers at other companies, we bring diverse career experiences to each job--in other words, we're at least vaguely aware of better ways of doing things that are happening in other places.

If we want to go beyond just talking about better ways of doing things, we need to empower engineers to capture their ideas for improvement in the backlog right next to ideas from the product management side. It's critical, of course, that items in the backlog generated by engineers are refined, estimated, and actually included in sprints on a regular basis.

And we want to go beyond the all-too-easy step of adding a one-line ticket at the end of our backlog that says “do cool thing X”. Since no one has the foggiest idea how we’ll actually do that cool thing, the backlog item just sits there and no one ever puts it into a sprint because it’s too nebulous and scary and we don’t know how long it will take or if it’s even possible in a sprint-worth’s amount of time.

Make that “do cool thing X” a research ticket. Time-box the effort. We can put this into a future sprint because at the end of the time box (fitting within one sprint) we will have a documented outcome that gets us closer to the goal than we were before, and we’ll have a much better idea of the actual steps to get there with "real" tickets representing the work.

The output of these research tickets can be a comment saying we shouldn’t do this and here’s why. Or the output could be a series of other tickets the engineer creates with a ticket for each step of the process toward accomplishing the ultimate goal...or a nice intermediate goal.

Even if we end up looking at the list of steps for follow-on work and think, “Geez! That’s a lot of damn work to get the outcome we want!” and we decide it’s not worth the effort, that's still a great outcome.