When the world went remote in March due to the pandemic, the developer community reaction was immediate and fast. Now, with work-from-home measures set to continue for the long haul, teams are facing burnout as their COVID emergency response turns into a months-long test of endurance.

“If you’ve ever run a marathon, the first mile or two in the marathon you feel great, you just want to run and you want to power through it. You want to go hard,” said Jeffrey Hammond (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “But if you do that, by the time you get to mile 18 or 19 you’re going to be gassed, sucking for wind. And that’s, I think, where we’re starting to hit.”

Hammond spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the DevOps Virtual Forum. They discussed how DevOps and Agile teams are adapting their workflow under COVID-19. (* Disclosure below.)

Developers need to share mind space

GitHub Inc. stats show that remote developers work longer hours when they are colocated and are at risk of burnout. This means that managers need to make sure they have processes and tools in place to support their teams.

“We’re moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do,” Hammond said.

But how is this possible when the core premise of success for developer teams has always been the ability to be physically colocated? Transitioning the essence of how that colocation creates success is the key, according to Hammond.

“You have to look at what physical colocation has enabled in the past and understand that it’s not so much the fact that we’re together looking at each other across the table; it’s the fact that we’re able to get into a shared mind space,” he said. “It’s the spiritual aspect of that physical colocation that is important.”

The traditional Agile Manifesto focus of culture, structure, organization and process over tools needs to be reframed to make communication tools of equal priority, according to Hammond. “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation is absolutely still important,” he said. “But employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually colocated and if you want to have a shared purpose.”

Prioritizing agility as equal to or more important than speed is another cultural change developer teams should make. “When you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important than just flat out velocity,” Hammond said.

Developers need to be allowed to have team autonomy, have the tools to enable them to communicate with shared purpose and adapt to master new technologies, according to Hammond.

“Then they’re in the zone; they’ll get spiritually connected,” he said. “Just remember, if you’re going to run that marathon, break it into 26 10-minute runs, take a walk break in between each, and you’ll find that you’ll get there.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevOps Virtual Forum. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DevOps Virtual Forum. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE