Practice Sprints
Posted by mbsnapp on January 31, 2008
synoppsys: At the beginning of December 2007, our team engaged in 2 practice sprints (in 2 week iterations) within the Scrum project management framework with mixed success.
The two mini-projects were:
1) a new home page for one of the sites we support;
2) a “spike” on Ruby as applied to another one of our applications that needs to be rewritten.
Summary of our Sprint Retrospective:
What went well?
- Introduced peer accountability.
- Kept us focused.
- Added structure to the process.
- Gave us short-term goals.
- Daily meetings provided opportunity to quickly check status.
- Good for team-building.
What didn’t go so well?
- Did not do burndown charts.
- Took on lots more than agreed-upon.
- Did not write in stories.
- Kept track of actual hours, rather than estimated hours.
- Felt bad in daily meetings if we did not accomplish anything the day before.
- Couldn’t analyze tasks (which were being tracked in Outlook).
- Spikes are uncomfortable if you’re working by yourself.
What will we do next time?
- Write in user stories.
- Estimate product backlog in story points.
- Prioritize stories.
- Estimate sprint backlog in hours.
- Do burndown charts.
- Try Sharepoint with backlogs in Excel.
- Do more research on Scrum.
Since these practice sprints, we have completed a few more sprints. Each time, we are becoming more comfortable with the approach, improving our processes and becoming more productive.
