Skip to main content

Scrum Sprint duration – which is ideal; 4 weeks or 2 Weeks or 1 Week? Checklist


The CTO heard about SCRUM. He asked the PMO to implement it. We got a big training. Everyone is happy. We know everything about scrum- product backlog, sprint backlog, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective. Wow so cool. But no one told me the duration of a sprint. How can my trainer not know about this? This seems familiar? There should be many yeses.
There is no definite duration for sprint !!!
Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland started the sprints with 30 days duration. Now majority of the companies prefer 2 week sprints. If you don’t have any idea; start with 2 weeks. After the couple of 2 weeks iterations get together with the team, collect their feedback and decide whether you want to change the sprint duration. Personally I have seen teams with sprint duration of 20 days, 15 days, 2 weeks & even 1 week (I have my two teams running on 1 week).

Checklist for sprint duration change.
Reduce the sprint duration
  • Poor estimation (if team complains that they work for 8 hours on the task estimated for 4 hours) 
  • Poor quality (lot of bugs & performance issues) 
  • Unable to meet the sprint objectives  
  • Lot of scope creep 
  • Nature of deliverables (if the team is responsible for the delivery of small reports or documents which won’t take more than couple of days) 
When the sprint duration is reduced team will meet more often for planning and review. This will help in better planning, estimation & understanding of sprint objectives. PO will also have a better time managing all the changes in the backlog due to frequent changes in customer priority.
Increase sprint duration
  • Product backlog is almost stable  
  • The inability of the customers/PO/stakeholders to meet periodically to review the delivery 
  • Nature of deliverables (some deliverables need long time to develop, integrate & test)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PDCA & SCRUM (or Agile); Why is it important?

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan  This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviations in future. Team also
Post a Comment
Read more

Product Backlog: Should you write everything in user story format?

I like user stories a lot. They help everyone talk the same language and results in a better product. User story alone does not constitute product requirement. User story is supposed to be a place holder for discussion which should happen between the team, Product Owner and the customer. This discussion result in a common understanding which along with the user story content is the product requirement. This format captures the essence of requirement without confusing the readers User Story is only one of the many different ways in which requirements can be represented. This is not mandatory in any Agile “process”. But many have made this mandatory. I have seen many spending countless hours trying to write the requirements in user story format when they could have easily written that in simple one-line sentence in few minutes.   I have seen team members refusing to even discuss the requirement until product owner rewrote the requirement in user story format. Once I
Post a Comment
Read more

Why is potentially shippable product quality important

Agile teams work in iterations. During this period, they are supposed to work on product increments which can be “delivered” at the end of iteration. But how you know that the correct product was delivered? Many teams have different kinds of acceptance criteria and Definition of Done (DoD). But in many cases, this “done” is not the real “done” there might be some testing pending, some integration or review pending or anything else which prevents the actual use of the product increment. Many of these teams will need additional iterations to finish hardening their products. Many teams will implement different types of “gates” or approval steps to move to next stage. The free flow of product will be interrupted. They might end up doing mini waterfall within their agile process. Many don’t even realize this. This results in poor quality and requires additional effort to “harden” the product. Potentially Shippable Product increment The acceptance criteria and DoD should be modified
Post a Comment
Read more