Agile Development: Sprint Retrospective

In my previous post in this Agile Development series I detailed the typical workflow for planning a sprint. In this post I will outline the process of the sprint retrospective. One helpful way to think about the sprint retrospective is as a mini postmortem. During the retrospective the team goes over what went well, what didn't go well, and what the team could have done better.

What Went Well

The reason we ask what went well is not so that we can pat each other on the back and inflate our egos. One of the keys to a successful agile project is consistency in the velocity of the team sprint over sprint. One of the best ways to do this is to identify what lead to success so that the team can capitalize on it in the upcoming sprint(s).

What Didn't Go Well

As with most growth being realistic, open and honest about our mistakes and failures leads to not repeating them. The purpose of identifying what didn't go well is NOT to lay blame on any particular person or people. Identifying what didn't go well helps us to avoid or correct them those mistakes.

What Could Be Done Better

At first this may not seem different from identifying what didn't go well. The real difference is that we recognize things that may have gone well but could have gone better. Asking what we could do better is an opportunity to identify gaps in our planning, our process, and our estimates. This question should lead directly to actions that can be taken to increase or maintain the teams current velocity.

Because the sprint review typically takes place before the planning of the next sprint asking these three questions provides the team with the opportunity to make changes that give them a higher likelihood for success before the next sprint starts.

Agile Development: Planning A Sprint

In my previous post in this Agile Development series I walked you through the daily stand-up. In this post I'll go outline the typical workflow for planning a sprint.

Identify The Features

The product owner, who is serving as the voice of the customer, proposes the highest priority features. The scrum team is responsible for getting clarification, pushing back on features, and proposing features or work that should be accomplished. Features should be prioritized based on their overall business value. It's important to note that working on tech debt can often provide down stream business value by enabling new feature work.

Prioritize and Estimate

Once the scrum team has identified the features to work on in the sprint, the team should then pull all of the stories associated with that feature into the sprint backlog. The product owner and scrum team should negotiate the priority of the stories. Once the priority of the stories has been determined the team needs to estimate the level of effort for each individual story.

One typical way of estimating stories during planning is to pick a story that does not have a lot of ambiguity which represents a medium (tee-shirt sized) amount of work. The team then assigns that story a point value (the middle value of their pointing system). The team then moves on to point the rest of the stories based on them being either more effort or less effort than the original story. Stories that are more effort are assigned a higher point value while stories with lower effort are assigned a lower point value.

Determine What Stories Make It Into The Sprint

Just because the product owner or scrum team has identified a feature (and it's related stories and bugs) as high priority doesn't mean that the team can actually complete that feature in a sprint. The team needs a way to estimate the amount of work that can be accomplished by the team during the sprint. This is typically done through velocity tracking.

Velocity in agile is typically determined by the amount of points the team was able to accomplish in the previous sprint. Historical sprints aren't to be taken into account as each sprint the teams goal is to get better and better as estimating the level of effort for story work.

The sprint backlog should only contain enough stories to meet the teams velocity. Choosing to few story points means that the team will likely have to poach more work (which hasn't been vetted) from the product backlog. Choosing too many story points means the team is not likely to finish all the work in the given sprint, setting the team up for failure from the start.

At first the teams velocity will be all over the place as they work out their estimation techniques. But over time the team should start to settle in to a consistent velocity. It's important to be aware that there are several common practices that can negatively affect a teams velocity. It's important for the sprint team to guard against these in order to accurately gauge their velocity sprint over sprint.

Under or over estimating the level of effort of a story

Often this is the result of ambiguity that is not resolved priority to planning. If the team doesn't have enough information to accurately gauge the level of effort for a particular story the product owner and scrum master should first work to resolve the ambiguities before a feature or story is considered for a sprint. This is an example of a valid reason for the sprint team to push back on a particular feature or story.

Unplanned sprint work or re-prioritization of the sprint deliverables mid-sprint

This is an Agile no-no and should be avoided at all costs. In Agile our sprint duration is typically short enough that when new work comes up we can prioritize it at the next sprint planning meeting. If new high priority work or re-prioritization mid-sprint is truely unavoidable the best way to make sure it doesn't impact the overall sprint deliverables is for the whole team to understand what the lowest priority work is and have that work drop out of the sprint.

Unaccounted for absence

People are going to take vacation, get sick, or be off for a holiday. It's difficult to account for sick time but it is very easy to account for holiday's and vacation time. Make sure in your sprint planning you understand how many days during the sprint people know they will be out and reduce that sprints velocity accordingly.

Other regular duties

Many software organizations use the DevOps model where the developer is on-call for the software and services they own. Not accounting for this type of work can have a negative impact on planning as the sprint team will sign-up for more work than they can actually accomplish.

Break The Stories down into tasks

Once the sprint backlog has been determined the team should break the stories down into smaller more granular tasks. This allows for more story work to be done in parallel. The team can swarm on a story together ensuring that the highest priority work is done first.

Once the tasks are identified the team is ready to start the sprint!

Agile Development: Stand-up

In my previous post in this Agile Development series I explained two ways to determine sprint duration. In this post I'll go into detail on what an agile stand-up typically looks like.

One thing you've heard me mention over and over in this series is that one of the primary goals of agile is to decrease the total time it takes to complete the feedback loop. One key way to accomplish this is with a daily stand-up.

In it's most basic form the stand-up is a time-boxed meeting (typically 15 minutes) where the scrum team gets together and answers three simple questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. What am I blocked on?

What Did I Do Yesterday?

In it's most basic form this question is intended to determine if progress was made towards the overall sprint goals. Knowing, as a team, what has already been accomplished helps the team formulate a plan for what needs to be accomplished over the next day.

I've seen this question often turn into a check-list of everything you did during the day. But it's important to keep in mind that your goal is not to provide an overview of everything you did. Instead, the purpose of this question is to make sure that others are aware of how much progress was made towards the work you committed to the day before. This is especially important when work items in the sprint are interdependent.

What Am I Going To Do Today?

There are two reasons that telling the team what you plan to accomplish for the day is important. First, it allows the team to validate whether the work is really the top priority for the sprint. During sprint planning many teams will prioritize the backlog for the sprint. But because our feedback loop is so short the priorities of any individual task may change throughout the sprint or even daily.

The second reason this question is important is that you are making a commitment to the team to accomplish a particular task. You can think of it as your daily contract with the team. And in turn the other members of the team are making a commitment to you to get other work done. This is how the team is able to increase and maintain a particular velocity. The team is able to time and coordinate work at a granular level that allows the team to maintain a constant throughput. 

What Am I Blocked On?

Making sure that the team is aware of any potentially blocking issues allows the team to react quicker and not allow blocking issues to affect the teams throughput. Because the scrum team talks about this daily, it is able to address potentially blocking or blocking issues immediately.

If a particular team member is blocked on a technical issue, I've often seen the scrum team swarm on the issue until it gets resolved. This has the benefit of making sure any blocking issue that is an upstream dependency of other sprint tasks gets resolved quickly and the team is able to dedicate more of the sprint to work that was planned.

If an issue cannot be resolved due to some unforeseen circumstance the sprint team has the ability to adjust and pull in additional tasks into the sprint while the blocking issue is being resolved. Because we talk about blocking issues daily, there shouldn't be a significant impact on the sprint schedule.

Parking Lots

It's often the case that during stand-up an issue comes up that requires a deeper dive than the 15 minutes allotted allows for. Fight the urge to go into detail during stand-up on the issue. Instead, announce that you have a parking lot and who should attend and then table the issue until after the stand-up is over. This allows less of the team to be randomized by an issue that isn't directly related to their daily commitment. 

Agile Development: Determining Sprint Duration

In my previous post in this Agile Development series I explained the anatomy of a sprint in terms of the three different sprint phases. In this post I'll detail the two main ways sprint duration is determined.

Fixed Time

Most sprint teams you come across will use a fixed time for their sprints. In my experience 2 to 3 week sprints are the most common duration. The goal of a fixed time sprint is to shorten the feedback loop with the customer in order to deliver the right features to them. By limiting the time to 2 or 3 weeks you can easily change course as the requirements change and provide continued business value to the customer without spending a lot of time on features that won't be used or whose requirements have changed.

Having a fixed time sprint allows the team to set expectations with your customer on what new features they will be building and when they will be available to the customer. I would strongly suggest that you don't have sprints that are longer than 3 weeks in duration. 2 to 3 weeks keeps the feedback loop small while also giving the sprint team enough time to build a feature out end to end. Increasing the amount of time it takes to complete the feedback loop means that the sprint team could spend more time building the wrong product and less time building the correct product should the requirements change.

It is occasionally the case with a fixed time sprint where the sprint will end and the team will have been unable to complete a particular feature. In this case the retrospective should identify the cause of the decreased velocity. Typical causes for a decrease in velocity (in my experience) have been:

• Failure to account for vacation or known leave of sprint team members.
• Failure to account for time spent on external work (like on-call duties).
• Failure to account for the unexpected work that grows the sprint backlog.
• Undefined or not well defined definitions of done.
• Stories that are too large and hide dependencies.
• Unknown external dependencies. 

Fixed Feature

Another, less common, way to determine sprint duration is to use a fixed feature approach. This approach says that a sprint is complete only when a particular feature is complete regardless of time. This is typically used when it is known that dependencies are hidden but that it is not easy to uncover those dependencies without first doing some work towards the end goal of the feature. In a system without a well defined or understood architecture, a fixed feature sprint duration is often used as it allows for the unknowns that go with the not well defined architecture.

Earlier in my career this was a more appealing way to determine sprint duration but as I've grown in my Agile planning I've come to realize that open-ended sprint duration's actually detract from shipping software more than they contribute to shipping complete software. Even with the most ambiguous problems it is usually better to first root out the ambiguity in a fixed time sprint and then plan and work on the feature.

Another reason that I've found for fixed feature sprints being less than ideal is that you have a harder time gauging your velocity as your velocity is determined by the amount of work you can complete in a fixed amount of time. Since knowing you're velocity is key for estimating when a feature is complete without it you cannot set your customers expectations as to when they will get a particular feature.

Fixed feature sprints also increase the time it takes to complete the feedback loop. And, as I mentioned earlier, increased feedback loops mean that it takes longer to respond to customer requests.