The Agile Pocket Guide: A Quick Start to Making Your Business Agile Using Scrum and Beyond

Chapter 12

Timeboxed Sprints (Iterations) and the Meaning of Done

Your Agile Team wants to be as productive as possible, but not only that—your team wants to optimize efficiency, increase predictability, and reduce risk. The various other business units are vying for your attention and resources at this moment, and the leaders from those Tribes want to see results as soon as possible. They have almost stopped going to the mystical waterfall and the processes that it instills in people. They are waiting on you to report back to them that work can be done faster than a 9–12 month plan. You have your marching orders. You have a project plan. Now it's time to break those out into logical time units where you can complete working product. Figure 12.1 shows a step toward the goal: product release.

Figure 12.1 A Release and Sprint Calendar

When you have spent time estimating the tasks and features, gather your team and all members working on the particular project. It is now time for them to help you commit to a certain amount of work within a given time frame, and now is the time when using an online Agile tool can help.

Timeboxed sprints need to have the following guidelines:

• The sprint goal is established and well understood throughout the team.
• All sprints are four weeks or fewer. (Many teams have found that they can successfully push product out even in a week!)
• All sprints must ...