An Introduction to Sprint

A sprint is a timebox of one to four weeks.

• A sprint should be planned well during a sprint planning.
• Sprint Duration and deliverables should stay the same once it has been planned.
• The team will only work if the technical practices are followed completely in a sprint.
• Product quality should be good enough to receive meaningful feedback.

Factors to consider while selecting the sprint duration:

1. Stability of backlog
2. Cost of iteration
3. Stakeholder feedback

What is the Sprint Cycle?

In software development, a sprint cycle involves time-boxed iterations lasting two to four weeks for a team to create and deliver specific work.

There are 6 Ways to Manage Sprint Cycles:

1. Involve the entire team:

"Sprint cycles are commonly utilized in Agile and Scrum methodologies for software development and project management."

• Product owner – They offer product backlog items such as sprint goals, deliverables, and user stories, which describe the wants and expectations of the product's users.
• Scrum master – The Scrum master facilitates the development team in meeting sprint cycle deliverables and ensuring alignment between product owners and the team.
• Development team – The development team, including researchers, designers, developers, testers, etc., is responsible for delivering the sprint cycle's goals and addressing any product issues or errors.

2. Plan your sprint meeting:

Every sprint cycle should include five essential meetings: backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

• Backlog refinement meeting – In this meeting, the product owner defines the items and priorities for the sprint cycle. "The backlog refinement meeting clarifies items and priorities for the upcoming sprint cycle."

• Sprint planning meeting – During this meeting, the development team will discuss the items to be handled in the upcoming sprint cycle with the product owner. They will also arrange the things in order of priority. The meeting should end with an agreement between the product owner and the development team regarding the expected deliverables.
• Daily-standup meetings – As the name suggests, these meetings happen every day. Every team member is expected to say what they did the previous day and what they hope to accomplish in the coming day.
• Sprint review meeting – The team presents the item to the product owner during this meeting. The product owner hopes to be satisfied with the results, allowing the team to move forward with the next sprint. During the sprint review meeting, team members also review the just-concluded sprint cycle. This meeting is usually attended by the product owner, scrum master, development team, and stakeholders.
• Sprint retrospective meeting – The team analyzes the previous sprint cycle’s process and workflows, pointing out areas that need improvement. Start-stop-continue is a popular approach used in these meetings. The members will say what they’d love to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. This ultimately improves the workflows and overall efficiency of future sprint cycles. Note that stakeholders do not attend the sprint retrospective meeting. Only the product owner, scrum master, and the development team participate in these meetings.

3. Define deliverables:

To measure the success of a sprint cycle, the product owner and the development team will agree on certain milestones or deliverables at the beginning of the cycle. Everyone involved in the project must be aware of these deliverables.

4. Use tools for team management:

In today’s era of remote teams, team or project management tools have become important. Even if the entire team is onsite, you’ll still need project management tools. There are multiple tools available like Jira, Trello, Slack, etc.

5. Update the user stories:

User stories are at the core of the workflow in the sprint cycles. The development team is working to achieve a deliverable to help product users complete a particular task. Therefore, the success of any sprint cycle will ultimately depend on how well the final product has achieved the user story.

6. Include inputs from previous sprints:

There’s a reason successful agile teams hold sprint retrospective meetings after every sprint cycle. They use these meetings to identify issues from the previous cycle to improve their performance for the next cycle.

SCRUM Events: Let's Understand the Scrum event in detail

• The goal for the team is to make an informed commitment about what they will deliver.
• The Sprint planning meeting usually takes 1-2 hours per week of sprint duration.

Velocity-Driven Approach:

• Velocity measures the amount of work the team can do in a given sprint or iteration.
• The velocity-driven approach works only when the team knows the velocity of the team.

Commitment-Driven Approach:

• A commitment-driven approach is used when the team needs more data.
• The team is unable to predict the amount of work that can be accomplished.
• Sprint is planned based on the willingness of the team to commit.

Daily Stand-up:

• The daily stand-up meeting or daily scrum is a forum for information sharing within the team.
• Meetings are timeboxed to a maximum of 15 minutes per day

Sprint Review:

1. The teams get together to showcase their achievement.
2. It is a demo of a working product built by the team.
3. The attendees of the meeting include all developers, product owners and scrum masters.  Additionally, invite stakeholders interested in the product, who can provide valuable feedback.
4. The meeting usually is one or two hours long.
5. The Purpose of the review is to:

•Showcase the achievements of the team

•Generate feedback from stakeholders

•Decide about the release of the product in the present form

Sprint Retrospective:

1. A sprint retrospective is held after the sprint review process.
2. It helps the team review the effectiveness of the process & make necessary adjustments.
3. The attendees of the meeting include all developers and the scrum master.
4. The purpose of the meeting is to:

•Make the issue visible

•Come up with improvement opportunities

•Take ownership of the action