Making Your Sprints More Effective
The purpose, timebox and participants of the Sprint are well defined. However, we’ve seen Scrum Teams fall into anti-patterns that diminish their value.
Common antipatterns include:
- Continually rolling over work from one Sprint to the next - Teams that do not plan their work to fit into the Sprint find themselves pushing work into the next Sprint.
- Frequently changing the Sprint length - As the product evolves, it may be appropriate to either lengthen or shorten the Sprint. However, frequently changing the length of the Sprint may indicate that the team is going back and forth between a desire to have less frequent meetings (Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective) and their realization that they need more frequent feedback from stakeholders.
- Specialized Sprints - Specialized Sprints (such as design, analysis or testing Sprints) generally indicate that something is wrong in the team’s understanding of Scrum. For example:
- Some teams create a “Sprint 0” which is a Sprint before the formal start of the project. When a team suggests having a Sprint 0, it may be because they feel they must create some artifacts (such as a Product Backlog and the Definition of Done), or resolve some procedural or technical questions (such as what tools to use in developing the product) before Sprinting. However, the essence of Scrum is to be able to start with complex problems and to incrementally and iteratively solve them. There is no such thing as “Sprint 0,” it’s just a “Sprint.”
- Some teams create a “hardening” Sprint which is dedicated to improving the quality of the product. If the team feels it’s necessary to have a “hardening” Sprint, it’s often because they haven’t taken care in creating, evolving and conforming to their Definition of Done. They typically take on too much work and don’t have the time to create a high-quality result. There should not be “hardening” Sprints. Instead, in early Sprints the Definition of Done may be less stringent and over the course of many Sprints, the Definition of Done may become increasingly stringent, forcing later Sprints to have higher quality expectations rather than abruptly creating a Sprint to rectify the quality issues.
- Some teams create a “Sprint 0” which is a Sprint before the formal start of the project. When a team suggests having a Sprint 0, it may be because they feel they must create some artifacts (such as a Product Backlog and the Definition of Done), or resolve some procedural or technical questions (such as what tools to use in developing the product) before Sprinting. However, the essence of Scrum is to be able to start with complex problems and to incrementally and iteratively solve them. There is no such thing as “Sprint 0,” it’s just a “Sprint.”
- Running Sprints as mini-waterfall projects - The beginning of the Sprint is used for solution development. Near the end of the Sprint timeframe, all of the work goes into a testing phrase.
- Putting the entire Sprint Backlog in “doing” when the Sprint starts - Often, teams use a board to visualize the state of each Sprint Backlog item. At a minimum, these states are “To Do,” “In Progress,” “Blocked” or “Done.” This antipattern results when Developers select the PBIs they intend to work on at the beginning of the Sprint and put them all in the “doing/in progress” state.
Tips for Strong Sprints
Breaking the antipatterns listed above help create strong and effective Sprints. Consider the following tips:
- A two-week Sprint may be a good starting point for determining the Sprint length. If PBIs cannot be made small enough to fit into a two-week Sprint or Sprint Goals cannot be defined so that they can be achieved in two weeks, consider lengthening the Sprint. Shorter Sprints are beneficial because they provide opportunities for more frequent feedback and adaptation.
- Keep the length of the Sprint as consistent as possible. Sometimes teams increase the length of the Sprint during vacation periods, often to keep their “velocity” consistent across Sprints. However, velocity is a poor measure of value creation. Teams should simply reduce the amount of work they forecast during periods of high absenteeism.
Resources:
Blog Post
A personal experience and a tangible exercise to show why complexity requires ‘doing’ instead of ‘thinking’
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Blog Post
One common consequence of teams that do not deeply understand Scrum and the nature of its events is that they believe it is possible to run sprints which do not produce a Done and releasable increment of the product. This belief typically leads to dangerous consequences so it’s important to caution ...
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Unlike the other Scrum Events, the Sprint isn’t a meeting. Instead, it’s the container for all of the work that’s done by a Scrum Team to achieve a Sprint Goal. The Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective all fall within the Sprint.