‘I wish’..My vision!

Friends, today we will have a quick tour of a sprint. This journey will give us an overview of sprint taking place.

This is a fact that any product development starts with a ‘vision’- a clear vision. In scrum the vision need not to be created as a large multi page document. Only a small vision statement is sufficient.

The vision is further converted into stories (epics) in this initial phase. It is not necessary that scrum team will write these epics as scrum team may/may not have been formed at this stage.

This high level road map is created in the form of initial product backlog.

Once the vision gets approved by the stakeholders and scrum team has been formed, a release planning is done to establish the next logical step toward achieving the product goal. A definition of done (DoD) is also established. Product backlog grooming is one of the processes taken up during release planning. Release planning is done generally considering either fixed date (only those features are considered which could be delivered on planned date) or fixed scope (features will be decided first and based on that date is finalized). Team’s velocity is also taken into account.

The very next step is to conduct a story writing workshop. Epics are broken into stories and the stories are estimated in story points. Though Product owner is the primary person to write these stories, however if needed the complete scrum team helps him to write user stories.

A release generally consists of many sprints. Before each sprint a sprint planning is done. This planning takes 4 to 8 hours. The Product owner produces the prioritized product backlog consisting of the estimated PBIs with the defined acceptance criteria. Scrum team selects the stories and this makes the sprint backlog. Sprint backlog contains the break-up of user stories in tasks which is estimated in hours.

Here starts the sprint execution. Daily scrum (also known as daily scrum meeting – timeboxed for 15 minutes) is a part of sprint execution and as name indicates, occurs on daily basis.

When the sprint is about to finish, two most important activities are done. Sprint review and sprint retrospective. Sprint review (Timeboxed 120 minute max for 2 week sprint) is done by the stakeholders to see the completed work and ascertain that the sprint is executed as per the definition of done. Sometimes sprint review is also called sprint demo. However sprint review is more than a demo. It’s an ‘inspect’ activity.

After sprint review the last important activity Sprint retrospective is done (Timeboxed 60- 90 minutes max for 2 week sprint). In this activity the scrum team review all the scrum related activities performed. Team also envisions whether any activity needs improvement? And if yes, how to achieve that? Three important points discussed are:

• What we want to continue doing?
• What we should stop doing?
• What improvement should be done?

Outcome of every sprint is a shippable product increment. The subsequent sprint starts very next day once the current sprint finishes.

Any point needs more insight, please let me know. See you soon!