Engineering Support Duty Rotation
It is common for engineers to have to support products they have built. Sometimes this takes the form of being on-call, sometimes there are other layers that interface directly with customers before engineering is called in to help. Regardless, it is important to establish some structure around this support responsibility with well-defined expectations, so that it is fair to all team members. In my org I enable this with a support duty rotation.
A dedicated engineer from each team / product area is responsible for support duty every sprint. This includes:
- monitoring the relevant channels on Teams,
- interfacing directly with end users,
- re-directing to relevant SMEs,
- creating and following up on tickets,
- augmenting documentation when applicable.
A key responsibility of the person on support duty is to monitor the performance, scalability and reliability (PSR) channel. It is incumbent on us to ensure we on top of PSR by:
- Capturing issue in a ticket.
- Working with me / manager / team lead / scrum master to prioritize ticket and when applicable add it as mid-sprint addition (MSA) in the current sprint. We can figure out what gets pushed out to make room.
- Providing daily updates on the ticket on investigation and progress towards a fix.
The person on support duty has a ticket allocated to block off time for this responsibility. This is a rotating role and over time each person from a team is expected to participate. A support duty rotation is typically for a sprint.