One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in their code branch on Mondays, need to get it into QA by end of day Wednesday, and be done with bug fixes and completed QA acceptance by end of day Friday. That code revision then gets deployed the following Tuesday.

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That schedule is not only hectic but adds a level of inefficiency. What I observed was that some developers would finish their tasks early and not be able to work on the next week's tasks. Other developers would not be finished with QA acceptance on Friday and instead continue bug fixing well into Monday and occasionally Tuesday. This last scenario is especially harmful because at that point, the development schedule is behind a day or two, and is only getting started the day that it should be getting wrapped up. That leads to the same situation the next week.

To alleviate this I worked with my team to come up with a new work flow. I created a sandbox branch that developers could work ahead in if they finished their tasks early. It also allowed developers to get a head start on tasks that might take them longer to work on. It also allowed the team to position itself to take on larger and larger tasks.

The sandbox branch I suffixed DEV and the production ready branch that was QA'ed was suffixed PROD.

The new work flow became: code in DEV on Monday and Tuesday. After production deployment propagate DEV branch to PROD branch and continue to work in PROD until end of day Wednesday. Thursday QA begins on PROD branch and development can begin on the next week's tasks in that week's DEV branch.

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We also spun up a second QA server instance. In this second instance we could deploy our DEV branch to get early QA and sign off on certain tasks.

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