Category: sprint

What's the ideal Sprint length

November 20, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can't recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly.

As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context - this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world.

The Context

A team of 5 members currently working with 10-day sprints. They haven't managed in the previous 5 sprints to have 100% of the User Stories completed. It is typically around 60-70% completeness.

A Simple Scrum Sprint Review

January 21, 2009 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of cole24@Flickr

At the end of the sprint, the Product Owner, Team and Scrum Master meet to review the progress of the sprint. The product owner has to evaluate the state of the project so s/he can decide what to do next. How does the Product Owner ensure that s/he gets a complete and correct understanding about the state of the project, including all inconvenient truths? Here is a simple agenda/meeting template to follow, to make sure all the bases are covered.

Last week, I introduced that concept of a Sprint Contract to define the parameters of the sprint. The factors Scope, Quality, Time and Cost will be familiar to any project manager. Scope is defined by the stories and in particular their size. Quality is defined primarily by the definition of done. Time is fixed by the sprint duration. An upper limit on the costs is set by the team size * sprint duration, after adjusting for absences and other tasks.

A simple sprint review needs to

1. Confirm that the team has delivered on its commitments
2. Confirm that the overall project is on track
3. Examine the functionality which has been delivered.

The Effective Sprint Planning Meeting

January 14, 2009 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of Photocapy@Flickr

At the beginning of each sprint, the Scrum team and product owner negotiate the scope of the sprint. They have a limited amount of time to discuss and agree on the sprint backlog. The product owner wants functionality implemented properly and to invest development dollars wisely. The team wants a mandate it can fulfill. And everyone wants the meeting to finish on time! Here is an agenda (complete with a downloadable template) to follow so that your sprint planning will be successful.

5 tips for Iterating through the holidays

December 3, 2008 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of krisdecurtis@Flickr

As we get closer to the holiday season, external factors threaten to disrupt the sprint rhythm. People go on vacation, sprint meetings fall on or between the holidays, and company events pull the team away from project commitments. At the same time, the pressure rises to get affairs wrapped up by the end of the year. It’s time to get that release out, time to close that deal, time to define the next version.

Here are a couple of tips to help you get the through the holiday season with a minimum of additional (job) stress.

Sample Sprint Planning Procedure

May 13, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

The adaptation mechanisms built into the Scrum process allow for many modifications and adjustments in the sprint planning procedure. Different variations work for different teams and environments. Here is one of the variations that I find useful:

Preconditions

Product backlog contains a set of user stories sufficient for at least 2-3 sprints, ideally - for the whole current release and more. The team together with the Product Owner and possibly with some stakeholders went through the top stories 2-3 days earlier. As a result for a sprint or two there are enough reasonably small and well understood top priority product backlog items.

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What does it mean to reject sprint content?

April 15, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Scrum is an agile software development process with a high focus on the project management level. It has a concept of a sprint review in the end of the iterations, where the product backlog items taken into sprint (and possibly the whole sprint) are accepted or rejected. It is possible and even recommended to accept or pre-accept some items already during the iteration, but it is not mandatory and is not always possible.

During sprint review Product Owner indeed can reject the content, because the team got him wrong, perceived quality is low, some old features got broken or team simply did not have enough time to finish everything it was hoping to deliver. Then what does the rejection mean? Isn't it a bit too naive to expect the people disappointed by rejection deliver better during the next sprint? Isn't it easier just to add some "fix tasks" to the backlog?

Micromanagement in Agile/Scrum. Sprint to sprint control

February 15, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

There are not that many people who like micromanagement. No surprise that the fear of day to day micromanagement scares some people off the agile processes. That is not the only way agile processes can look micromanaging. All the agile processes employ the idea of iterative and incremental planning on pretty much every possible level. Scrum Product Owners can change the project priorities every 14-30 days, in Extreme Programming, the usual iteration length is just one week. Naturally the possibility for the rapid shifts in the priorities can make it difficult for the team to design and build a good architecture and work at a full possible speed.

Simple Sprint Backlog Example

October 15, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Update: Link to XLS fixed. Kudos to Jukka Laurila

Scrum backlog templates and examples

November 6, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Bas Vodde collected and published examples and templates of the Scrum product and Sprint backlogs. Most of them are in MS Excel format. Some (XLS) include a lot of comments, some (XLS) are very colourful. Check them out, Excel can really cover most of the needs of the archived backlog tracking.

Cached templates
Here are the cached copies of templates that I reviewed on this website.

• Petri Heiramo's advanced product and sprint backlog template -
  • Video tutorial on using it

See Also

• Simple Product Backlog Example
  • Video tutorial on using it
• Simple Sprint Backlog Example
  • Video tutorial on using it