What's important in a sprint?

Best bets for managing sprints for scrum success. 

As experienced agile software developers, we know that well-planned sprints are essential to scrum success. But did you know that your sprints are only as successful as the planning that goes into to them? Without proper planning, sprint goals and timelines can quickly veer off course putting your delivery goals at risk. Following are some of our best-practice strategies for getting the most out of scrum sprints.

Sprint planning and review

Never start at sprint without first having a sprint planning meeting. This is the time and place where sprint tasks and goals will be determined from the product backlog. It’s also where time estimates are established and development teams must commit to them.

Never begin a new sprint without having a review meeting for the sprint that just occurred. A final sprint review is needed to determine if the sprint goals were reached and to evaluate progress to date. It’s also the time to discuss challenges that occurred and what, if any, adjustments need to made moving forward.

Sprint participation

Sprint review meetings should be attended by members of the scrum team, including product owners, developers and a scrum master. Product owners will pull user stories from the product backlog, prioritize them and decide how much can be committed to in the sprint timeframe. A scrum master will help ease this process by removing any obstacles that get in the way of the developers achieving their sprint goals.

Sprint estimation

When the team estimation begins, be sure developers provide estimates for their assigned user stories and that these estimates are agreed upon by the team. Also, be sure these time estimates are consistent with user story priority so critical delivery tasks don’t get overlooked.

Sprint execution

During the sprint review meeting, developers should provide a demo of their completed user story to product owners. After each developer has completed his/her demo, the product owners should provide feedback and advice in regards to function and code and make recommendations for changes/improvements to remove bugs. These recommendations for change should be put back into the next sprint as a priority tasks.

At Shinetech, our developers know how to use scrum sprints to your competitive advantage. Contact us about our software and application development capabilities using agile development and scrum methodologies.