A redditor asked the following question:

Question#

We have a high volume of tech debt and anticipating new unplanned work in the next sprints. We currently absorb the work and kind of prioritise it before we add it. But it may get out of hand. How are you handling the work? What do you do when you are working on something and then a bug is more important and that happens often?

My answer#

I have a story 😀 Due to changes in my company structure, 3 months ago my team took over a product from another team and we faced similar issues. It was an application that combined some services. It was in really bad shape. No tests, no pipeline, no monitoring, bad code, framework version from 2014, useless documentation, lots of support because of bugs. But the app makes money. We have goals to meet, but we also decided to improve the state of the product.

We’ve been working in 2-week sprints and during the 3rd sprint we decided to change the way we work. We weren’t able to deliver the sprint goals because we discovered a lot of other problems that were blocking our sprint.

So we made our feedback cycle much shorter. We’ve dropped Scrum and started to work more like the FAST agile framework. It’s a flow process, more like Kanban than Scrum. We have planning every 2 days (it takes up to 15 minutes). We can adapt more quickly to the rapidly changing situation. After a month of working this way, I have to say that short planning horizon has been a really good experiment.

Now we have the pipeline, 20% code coverage, we release a couple of times a day and we have delivered half of the product target. Probably with Scrum we would do similar things, but we would have a lot more discussion about why we can’t deliver, and it would the team less happy. We also found in the first two sprints that long sprints in a dynamic environment meant that we didn’t do the most important thing, because we discovered that it was something different than we expected, and the sprint goal should be something else.

Long story short, you can try making the iteration time shorter.