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I work for a software solution consultancy. I tend to see productivity come and go in waves.

New projects => new enthusiasm => more productivity.

Towards the end of projects, and projects that require support and the odd feature addition tend to have much lower productivity.

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This is spot on. When I started writing the application I'm working on, it was as though I could divine new features overnight with little effort. Now, much of my energy goes to making sure I don't screw myself over with bad design decisions, fixing bugs, and answering questions about the software. I find that it is hard to write any code on some days. I'm glad to see this is common.

We often see a large "setup" sprint 0 set of tasks when kicking off a project. That being said, we are working in the MS environment using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

The setting up of the initial architecture, including ops tasks such as setting up the build / test servers is a painfully long process. I'd love to find a way to speed this up. Boilerplate setup would be extremely useful.

Same here, I'll find myself working weekends when I just get started, and leaving early when I'm nearing the end... tricky to change since I'm just not all that interested by the end.

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