Sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review. The duration of a sprint is determined by the scrum master, Traditionally, a sprint lasts 30 days. During the sprint, the team holds daily standup meeting to discuss progress and brainstorm solutions to challenges.
Each sprint begins with a planning meeting. During the meeting, the product owner (the person requesting the work) and the development team agree upon exactly what work will be accomplished during the sprint. The development team determines how much work can realistically be accomplished during the sprint At the end of the sprint, the team presents its completed work to the project owner and the project owner uses the criteria established at the sprint planning meeting to either accept or reject the work.
Who is Involved?
Scrum Master − The scrum master acts as a facilitator for the agile delivery team.
Product Owner − The product owner deals with the detailed view of the product backlog and their acceptance criteria.
Agile Team − Agile delivery defines their tasks and sets the effort estimates required to fulfil the commitment.
What is the sprint duration?
The Sprint duration is the period of time in which one sprint is counted as completed. This time period varies from team to team and depends on their preferences. However, usually, the duration is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. What is Sprint planning meeting?The Sprint planning meeting is held between the Scrum team, Product Owner, and Scrum Master. The objective of the meeting is to go through all of the user stories that are currently in the backlog. User stories are then selected with consensus between all parties and moved to the appropriate sprint. For the sprint planning meeting to be effective, the following checklist needs to be met:
User stories are prioritized well.
User stories are defined and explained well.
Before the meeting: Product owner explains the user stories and all of the use cases to everyone. The Team now has the opportunity to ask questions about them and get rid of any confusion and get clarifications.
The team now starts effort estimation using the method of planning poker. Once effort estimation is done, user stories are assigned to individual team members and work is started.
After the meeting: Once the meeting is over, the team member who has been working on user stories will write a task and each of those tasks will be estimated as well.
What is Sprint Backlog?
Sprint backlog is a list of the tasks and requirements to be completed within the sprint. The sprint backlog includes:
The list of user stories within the sprint in order of priority.
The relative effort estimate for each user story.
The tasks necessary to develop each user story.
The effort, in hours, to complete each task.
A burn down chart that shows the status of the work the development team has completed.
What is Scrum Velocity or Velocity Calculation?
An agile team calculates velocity based on past iterations. Velocity is an average number of units required to finish user stories in an iteration. For example, if a team took 12, 14, 10 story points in each iteration for the last three iterations, the team can take 12 as velocity for the next iteration. Planned velocity tells the team how many user stories can be completed in the current iteration. If the team quickly finishes the tasks assigned, then more user stories can be pulled in. Otherwise, stories can be moved out too to the next iteration.
What is Task Capacity
The capacity of a team is derived from the following three facts −
Number of ideal working hours in a day
Available days of person in the iteration
Percentage of time a member is exclusively available for the team.
Suppose a team has 5 members, committed to work full time (8 hours a day) on a project and no one is on leave during an iteration, then the task capacity for a two-week iteration will be − 5 × 8 × 10 = 400 hours
Planning Steps
Product Owner describes the highest ranked item of product backlog.
Team describes the tasks required to complete the item.
Team members own the tasks.
Team members estimate the time to finish each task.
These steps are repeated for all the items in the iteration.
If any individual is overloaded with tasks, then his/her task is distributed among other team members.