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.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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.