…which stands for “just do it”, and was the unofficial name of one of the development teams which sat alongside the R2 teams.

One key principle we had from the start of the project was that other development work couldn’t stop for the sake of the site rebuild. There might be less of it, but it shouldn’t dwindle to zero. And while R2 was a major long term undertaking, the rest of the work that came up inevitably had a very different shape. Consequently we had different kinds of teams.

The JFDI team handled very short turnaround work. Mostly this consisted of bugfixes, but it also included minor enhancements. It worked in a traditional Agile manner, but due to the size of the individual tasks work was reprioritised every day rather than every fortnight.

Working on the JFDI team suits some people better than others. On the one hand it’s difficult to get your teeth stuck into anything because it doesn’t last very long (or at least it shouldn’t); on the other hand you get a sense of completion every day. A lot of the time people don’t relish cycling into that team, but once they’re in they find they learn a huge amount about how the software they’ve written actually gets used. I’ve written more on this subject previously.

Overall the JFDI team has been very successful, dealing with a large and constantly-shifting workload, but also demonstrating daily progress to our internal users. Since R2 finished we’ve kept the team running in the same mode, and it continues to bring immediate benefit to people inside and outside the development teams.