How do you structure a development sprint?

Question

So, I have accumulated many functions, and we are going to begin work on a significant project. I'm working on defining the structure of our sprints, and I'm interested in feedback from the communities.

I think:

• One day sprint planning
  • Complete the backup and find out what each developer will do after this sprint.
• Three weeks of development
  • GO! GO! GO!
• Daily meeting
  • Check if anyone needs help or not.
• Two days sprint review
  • code reviews take place here, stakeholder presentations
• Once a sprint retrospective
  • What did we do in the last sprint? how can we do better next time?

Sprints should always end on Tuesday (to avoid too much stress on weekends).

Anything else? Obviously, this is flexible enough. I want to provide the team with a simple plan of how we will work when we start this project.

Answer 1

I would rather experiment with sprinters that are shorter than one month.

Personally, I find one-week iterations more effective for quickly getting effective feedback. It also prevents any problems that may cause problems at the iteration level, down to levels that are becoming more difficult to manage.

Even during a 30-day sprint - two days sound about a day before the end for a sprint review ... and one fine day sounds about 0.5 days for a retrospective. I found that if you need much more than there were communication problems while iterations continue, you might want to look at the need for lengthy reviews as a possible red flag.

Of course, this was my experience - mainly developing web applications with small (4-12) personal teams. Experience may vary.

However, I would definitely give shorter sprints. Like integration builds, a lot becomes easier if you do them more often.

Answer 2

Disable email, cell phone, and instant messaging apps for the main code. 10 am to 1 pm, from 2 pm to 5 pm can be good blocks for this.

Order food, drinks for the team when they are in the "zone".

Cancel all other meetings on the days before and after the planning session and review days.

Answer 3

• Make sure the "stand-up" remains STAND-up. It is very easy to slide into longer and longer meetings.
• One day of sprint planning and three days at the end may be too long. Plan as much time as you need.
• +1 to the idea of ​​shorter iterations. Personally, four one-week sprint iterations worked well. People are able to evaluate short-term tasks; past that he is becoming more and more speculation.

Answer 4

Looks like a good approach. Secondly, that Adrian and Jija talked about as short iterations as possible. I like 1 week. Like the best score, it also keeps the idea of ​​“working software” in a much shorter cycle.

A few questions:

Why do code reviews stay until the end? Any couple program or your feedback when you go.

Does 3 weeks of development mean "dev, test, documentation, installers, etc."? That is all you really need to do?

Answer 5

We structure our sprints very similar to your plan, except that our sprint reviews are the last day of the sprint and usually the last hour about an hour. Sprint review is the time when you show your work to customers and any other interested parties, and not the time to view the code. Code reviews, if you decide to execute them, should be performed periodically throughout the sprint. Previously, we had a block for one hour every week, where we switch to the code assigned by the developer, that is, we did not spend time looking at each LOC written.

We also finish our sprints on Tuesday and start on Thursday, leaving Wednesday to complete the free ends and solve the technical debt created during the sprint.

Answer 6

I do not recommend delaying code reviews until after the sprint, they should be an integral part of the development process. In other words, the task will not be executed if the code has not been viewed (and checked, and documented, and ...).

Answer 7

Its important to stay away from control for the sake of control. SCRUM requires only 1 appointment per day and short. In addition, during each sprint, the only other encounters are a retrospective of Spring and sprint planning. This allows us to implement a ROWE or result-oriented work environment. Let your developers decide how, where, when they will make their development. Use your daily racks to keep track of what they are doing. In addition, sit back and be surprised at their performance.

Ideas such as “turn off cell phones, turn off instant messaging apps, etc. while encoding” are all bad ideas. When you hire your team, you hire them with the confidence that they know how to do their job correctly. If you hired them with that understanding, why do you want to limit their ability to do their job in the best way they know? If you use SCRUM, each developer has chosen a job that they feel they can do, your job as a Scrum-Master is to remove obstacles, not create them.

Code Reviews: Absolutely Necessary. Peer-to-peer code reviews are a great learning tool for junior developers attending meetings and for those who review their code.

Design documentation. I personally believe that detailed project documents covering what the developer intends to do are very important, and I also believe that they are an important part of the development process. Now this is not connected with agile development, but I personally regularly refer to project documents created many years ago to understand what the original developer was thinking when they encoded their modules.