A sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum. Sprints last between one week and one month, and are a "timeboxed" (i.e. restricted to a specific duration) effort of a constant length.
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Scrum, agile and changes
We are starting a Sprint today, first day of a 3 week Sprint. Our requirements from the client are still evolving, so remaining hours is estimated on some unclear values.
How should a deviation in ...
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4answers
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Agile team missing commitments regularly and complaining about no trust
I am on the product side and have an agile team that has missed every sprint commitment through the first 4 by between 40 and 60% measured by points. The team continues to say, that it is OK and that ...
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271 views
Dynamic length of sprints in Scrum
I have been working several projects with Scrum method and, in some, we have taken the decision of execute Scrum sprints of dynamic length (every sprint).
For me it have some advantages:
Adapt the ...
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5answers
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How do I end crashed sprints and remain responsive to the customer?
We have been using Scrum methodology and have been mostly successful, but there are few weeks where the sprints are totally crashed by customer demands or defects.
Is there a better way of handling ...
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3answers
164 views
What to do with incomplete stories that depend on customers
We're starting with scrum, user stories, and agile. Some of our tasks require final testing from our customers to verify that they are completed according to their needs, but sometimes they don't ...
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4answers
255 views
Communicating requirements to offshore teams
Just to give a context, there is an offshore team in India for a client in San Francisco. The offshore team is about 9 developers and 4 QA, with one project manager. I am doing onsite coordination for ...
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3answers
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What is a good format for Sprint retrospectives?
We are doing Sprint retrospectives with the entire team including the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner present. We have constructive discussion and good ideas are being generated. However, to improve ...
8
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6answers
274 views
Why use iterations in Scrum?
I am a Scrum Master in a 7 person team. We currently use one-week iterations for our sprints.
I find that sprint planning overhead is huge (2 hours each week for entire team), and not nearly as ...
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3answers
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What are the right conclusions to draw from the success or failure of a Sprint?
I recently encountered the opinion that, if a Sprint is successful due to statistical reasons (e.g. the team made big mistakes during planning but the team delivered its stories anyway), then that's ...
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4answers
369 views
Managing a Product Owner in a not-yet-agile organization
When my company was acquired, my 20-person development team gained a Product Owner who is energetic, engaged, and extremely idealistic. While many of the programmers on our team are familiar with ...
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2answers
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SCRUM Sprint and tasks/user stories that cannot fit into a sprint!
Say I have an Epic that is estimated to take 3 sprints to do.
And the Epic is broken down into
A to Z tasks/user stories.
Problem is, to do B, we need A, to do C we need B, etc....
And in sprint ...
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2answers
103 views
Handling new suggestions to resolved user stories in closed sprint
In a project managed using scrum framework, I've a situation where all tasks associated to a user story (feature) had been done successfully. No more code changes are allowed since testing is in ...
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2answers
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How does one build a burnup chart?
Can someone explain how to build a burn-up chart? Please give me a walkthrough of how to build one?
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4answers
341 views
What are the benefits of having fixed length sprints for agile?
Lately, I have been the solo developer on a software development project and I break down my project into functionality that I believe I should be able to implement in 1 or 2 weeks depending on the ...
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5answers
429 views
How to cope with the Hawthorne effect and sprint improvements?
Hawthorne effect: the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed.
Background: I'm using Kanban as a tool to analyse and improve the ...
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3answers
308 views
Tracking points spent on bugs during sprint
The product owner wants to keep track on how much points are spent on bugs during a sprint. This can raise some issues, such as:
Scoring a task that is already done. Surprisingly even with it done, ...
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10answers
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What actions will you take when Iteration/Sprint goals are in danger?
Let's say, you are a Scrum Master and your team is in the middle of a Sprint. You see that all planned stories can't be completed till the end of the Sprint, that's for sure. What action will you ...
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3answers
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Advice for Special Short Sprints (2-5 Days)?
Most of our Sprints are 2 weeks long, but occasionally, we want to meet a special deadline in less time (2-5 days). So, we do a special "short" Sprint that is a bit different from our normal routine.
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Implementing scrum inside a real-world matrix organized software department
I'm working as a manager of the software department in our small sized company (~50 people).
I have three development teams, 3..4 Members each. One of the members in each team is in the role of the ...
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How to handle user stories that cannot be split and do not fit even a 30 days long sprint?
Given a small team (3 people or so) and a technically challenging area (e.g. middleware, embedded software etc.), and
Assuming that a user story is a smallest thing that has value for the end user,
...
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4answers
682 views
Scrum: Cancel or change a sprint
The Scrum method defines that the content of a sprint cannot be changed. But can a sprint be cancelled while it's done? I mean, it's unlikely to happen and probably shows really bad planning skills by ...
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9answers
4k views
How Long Should an Agile Sprint Be?
I'm currently PM on a project that is scheduled to run for about 14 months. The current sprint structure is 4 weeks of development; week 5 allows us to show progress to the client, deploy it for ...
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6answers
481 views
How can we avoid finishing all stories on the last day of a sprint?
I am the Scrum Master for a team that has completed two sprints. For Sprint 1, the burndown looks like:
Day 1: 70
Day 2: 70
Day 3: 70
Day 4: 70
Day 5: 13
For Sprint #2:
Day 1: 90
Day 2: 90
Day 3: ...
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6answers
190 views
Long running product development project
Background:
We have long running product development project, which consists of different features.
The development team consists of 15 developers and 5 QA engineers.
We setup releases each 5-7 ...
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4answers
1k views
Can Scrum Sprint duration change from 4 weeks to 2 weeks during the project?
Does it makes sense to adjust Sprint duration during the project?
Consider a 10 months project for a web portal, requirements are a little obscure right now, so I expect that at the beginning (first ...
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Improving your Scrum Sprint!
I know there are lots of talks and articles on agile and scrum. But I would like to know how to improve your scrum sprint for a new and small team. We are looking for a sprint length of 3 weeks. I ...
