Freedom Fridays

A (Mostly True) Story of Nurturing Innovation in an Agile Team

When all of Concourse is considered as a monolithic backlog, a single Pivot could possibly be working on the Elm front-end on Monday, fixing issues with the Garden container scheduling on Wednesday, and rotate onto a story implementing a new Fly CLI feature on Friday.

Breaking down the Concourse project into domains which can be understood as a smaller unit allowed us to be more strategic about rotating pairs, and we could nominate “track anchors” to lead longer running features within a track.

So, every week, the team has “FREE-dom Friday” where F.R.E.E is an acronym[²] :

Flexibility

One of the goals of this new experiment was to allow flexibility to move beyond the lanes of engineering work. We wanted our engineers to be able to explore other tracks, dive into parts of the code they hadn’t explored, or even perform “atypical” tasks like engaging with the community on PRs, forum discussions, writing blog posts, or triaging Github issues.

Refactoring

Exploration

Often when working on an issue or new feature in one of the tracks of works, an engineer will see several parts of the puzzle that is Concourse and think: “ I wonder if we could do something different here ”. Often these thoughts feel like too much of a rabbit hole to pull a pair down with you, but our Fridays have become a place for these ideas to thrive.

Experimentation

One of the rules we had for Fridays was that there were no specific deliverables beyond the immeasurable effect of growing the team’s innovative spirit. Fridays are a safe place for experimentation and failure.

Having a day where engineers can experiment beyond the tracks of work we have scheduled in the project allows them to look at things from a fresh perspective, gain insight into other aspects of the codebase, and come up with new ideas for Concourse.

As we frame this new practice within the day-to-day of the team, and talk about it with other teams. There’s been a lot of questions about the name and intent behind “Freedom Fridays”, and the gist is: we wanted to nurture the F.R.E.E acronym outlined above and we happened to land on carving out time for this on Fridays.

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