A Sprint. What is that?
The heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a “Done”, useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created. Sprints have consistent durations throughout a development effort. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.
Sprinting
The scrum folks really did think of everything. In order to plan your upcoming sprint, you use the sprintplanning meeting! Sprintplanning is a collaborative event where the team answers two basic questions: What work can get done in this sprint and how will the chosen work get done?
Choosing the right work items for a sprint is a collaborative effort between the product owner, scrum master, and development team. The product owner discusses the objective that the sprint should achieve and the product backlog items that, upon completion, would achieve the sprint goal.
The team then creates a plan for how they will build the backlog items and get them “Done” before the end of the sprint. The work items chosen and the plan for how to get them done is called the sprintbacklog. By the end of sprint planning the team is ready to start work on the sprintbacklog, taking items from the backlog, to “In-progress,” and “Done.”
During a sprint, the team checks in during the daily scrum, or standup, about how the work is progressing. The goal of this meeting is to surface any blockers and challenges that would impact the teams ability to deliver the goal set.
After a sprint, the team demonstrates what they’ve completed during the sprintreview. This is your team’s opportunity to showcase their work to stakeholders and teammates before it hits production.
Round out your sprintcycle with my favorite meeting, the sprint retrospective. This is your teams opportunity to identify areas of improvement for the next sprint. With that, you’re ready to start your next sprintcycle. Onward! 1
Underneath you can find an example how sprints and it’s goals & deliveries look like.
Goals:
Specify goals
Decide on colors and corporate identity
Setting up hosting and configure CMS settings
Create first page
Goals:
Specify goals
Decide on colors and corporate identity
Setting up hosting and configure CMS settings
Create first landingspage
Products:
Sitemap
CMS launched and workable
404 page
Landingspage
Products:
Sitemap
CMS launched and workable
404 page
Landingspage
Sprintplanning
During sprintplanning it is easy to get ‘bogged down’ in the work focusing on which task should come first, who should do it, and how long will it take. For complex work, the level of information you know at the start can be low, and much of it is based on assumptions. Scrum is an empirical process, meaning that you can’t plan upfront, but rather learn by doing, and then feed that information back into the process.
The goal describes the objective of the sprint at a high level, but the backlog Items can also be written with an outcome in mind. User stories are one great way of describing the work from a customer point of view. User stories, written like the one below, re-focus defects, issues, and improvements on the outcome the customer is seeking rather than the observed problem.
By adding clear, measurable results to the user story, the outcomes can be clearly measured, and you know when you are done. By getting as much up-front clarity as possible on the work the team is focusing on, everyone gets the transparency needed to get started on the work. For example, leaving things vague is much worse than describing something as a question to be answered during the sprint. 2
While doing web development for clients I myself make use of sprints. It gives clients the chance to quickly intervene when the design isn’t what they hoped it to be.