How to handle legacy project maintenance with Scrum [closed]

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My company is experimenting Scrum and we are currently building a new product. Often we have to do some maintenance in legacy projects and as their Scrum Master I'm puzzled how handle this inside the Sprint.

Should we wait for the end of the Sprint and make a new short iteration for the legacy projects?

Is it bad to have "parallel work" and allocate a single developer to solve the problem and do the maintenance?

Obs: my team currently has 4 developers only.

Edit:

Forgot to say: the maintenance and main project are separated and completely different.

Answer 1

The way I understand your situation is as follows:

1. There is effectively no link between the maintenance work and the new development.

2. The amount of maintenance is relatively small. (you say <=20%)

Of course you can schedule the work as part of the scrum, but that would create an artificial deadline for the maintenance work. Also, the maintenance is only relevant for a part of the team. So in your case, I would keep it out of the scrum planning. You can correct the availability of your team for the estimated amount of maintenance work, just like you would do if your team members have other tasks, or are on vacation or whatever.

This is of course important when you want to accurately predict your team's productivity.

Answer 2

Add the maintenance work to the Product Backlog and prioritize it along with all the other project work. This way you ensure that the highest priority work always gets done first.