How we Structure our Work: Three Week Sprints
Sprints are a defined amount of time to get the work done. When we first started with Agile, we tried a two-week sprint. That was too short. We have also tried a four-week sprint, that was too long. We have now settled happily on a three-week sprint (with one week of learning and development). This basically means that we plan out all the things we need to do in three-week chunks. The goal is to deliver incrementally: get feedback on small features, refine, and move onto the next small feature.
The Work
Work is defined in user stories. Ideally, they would be written as: “As a (specific user) I need to do X so that I can X”. This allows everyone on the team to fully understand the task at hand – what they are creating, why they are creating it, and what the intended outcome is. A good user story would also include acceptance criteria. These are all the requirements that would need to be met in order for the user story to be deemed complete.
Writing user stories takes a lot of time so we do not often write them out fully – though in a perfect world, we would.
An important thing to note: if a user story is too big to get done in three weeks that means it needs to be broken down into smaller, deliverable tasks.
The Roles
Usually in a fully functioning agile team there are many roles. As a smaller team we have two key roles that carry out key tasks.
- Product Owner: this is the person who knows the project the best. They map out the project in terms of tasks that need to get done and they know the business requirements. They write the user stories and acceptance criteria. This role is shared by Mary Kathryn (Manager, Web Services) and a Sr. Developer (each Sr. Developer is a lead on a project).
- Superhero: this is also known as a scrum master. This is a rotating role between the developers in that one developer will be the superhero for two weeks. What this means is that they will handle all dev service desk tickets that come in and they are not responsible for any sprint work during that time. Their focus is support. And running our daily standups.
The Meetings
Within the sprint there are four key types of meetings that we hold:
- Sprint planning meeting – We do these on the last Friday of learning and development week. This is where we plan out all the work, we will do over the three-week sprint. We usually have around 60 tasks that we go through.
- Daily stand-ups – We do these every morning from 9-9:15. We talk about what we did yesterday, what we will do today and anything that is blocking us from getting our task done.
- Demo – At this meeting folks get to show off the work they did, and we get feedback from clients.
- Retrospective – Here we talk about what went well in the sprint, what did not go well, and action items that we can bring into the next sprint. This is the key to continuous improvement.
Learning and Development Week
Our sprints are three weeks followed by one week of learning and development. This is where we take courses, do workshops, training, write documentation, and hold the demo/retrospective/planning meetings. We will talk more about this in a future post.
Want to learn more?
We recently hosted a Web Wednesday chat all about Agile, you can check out the recap here.