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So I have a backlog of features and we are about to get started on a sizable project. I am working on defining the structure of our sprints and I'm interested in the communities feedback.
What I'm thinking is:
One day sprint planning
Fill the backlog and figure out what each dev will go after this sprint
Three weeks of development
GO! GO! GO!
Daily stand up meeting
Check to see if anyone needs help or feels off track
Two days of sprint review
code reviews happen here, stakeholder presentations
One day sprint retrospective
what did we get done in the last sprint? how can we do better next time?
Sprints should always end on a Tuesday (to avoid too much weekend stress).
Anything else? There is obviously more to agile than this. I want to provide the team with a simple outline of how we are going to operate as we get this project started.
I'd consider experimenting with sprints that are shorter then one month.
Personally I find one-two week iterations more effective at getting effective feedback quickly. It also prevents any issues that may be causing problems at the iteration level building up to levels that become harder to manage.
Even for the 30 day sprint - two days sounds about a day to long for the sprint review... and one day sounds about 0.5 days too long for the retrospective. I've found that if you need much more than that there have been communication problems while the iterations has been going on - so you might want to look at needing long reviews as a possible red flag.
Of course that's just been my experience - of mostly developing web apps with smallish (4-12) person teams. You're experience may vary.
That said - I'd definitely give shorter sprints a try. Like integration builds - a lot of things get easier if you do them more often.
Turn off email, cell phone and instant messaging apps for core code time. 10am to 1pm, 2pm to 5pm might be good blocks for this.
Order food, drinks for team when they are in "the zone".
Cancel all other meetings for the days of, before and after the planning session and the review days.
Make sure the "stand-up" remains a STAND-up. It is very easy to slide into longer and longer meetings.
One day of sprint planning and three days at the end may be too much. Only schedule as much time as you need.
+1 to the idea of shorter iterations. Personally, four one-week iterations within a sprint have worked well. People are great at estimating near-term tasks; past that it becomes more and more guesswork.
Looks like a good approach. I second what adrianh and jedidja said about possibly shorter iterations. I like 1 weekers myself. As well as better estimation, it also keeps the idea of "working software" on a much shorter cycle.
A few questions:
Why are code reviews left until the end? Either pair program, or do your reviews as you go.
Does 3 weeks of development mean "dev, test, documentation, installers, etc" ? I.e. everything you need to be truly done?
We structure our sprints very similar to your outline except our sprint reviews are the last day of the sprint and generally on last about an hour. The sprint review is the time where you exhibit your work to the customers and any other interested parties, not the time to do code reviews. Code reviews, if you chose to do them, should be done periodically throughout the sprint. We used to have a one hour block each week where we'd go over developer nominated code, meaning we didn't waste time reviewing every LOC written.
We also end our sprints on a Tuesday and begin on a Thursday leaving Wednesday to wrap up loose ends and tackle technical debt created during the sprint.
I don't recommend postponing code reviews until after the sprint, they should be an integral part of the development process. In other words, a task is not done unless the code has been reviewed (and tested, and documented, and ...).
Its important to stay away from managing for the sake of managing. SCRUM only requires 1 meeting a day, and that's a short one. Additionally, during each sprint, the only other meetings are the Spring retrospective, and the sprint planning. This allows us to implement ROWE, or a Results Oriented Work Environment. Let your developers decide How, Where, When they will do thier development. Use your daily stand-ups to track that they are doing their work. Other than that, stand back and be amazed at thier productivity.
Ideas like "turn off cell phones, turn off IM apps, etc during coding" are all bad ideas. When you hire your team, you are hiring them with confidence that they know how to do thier job correctly. If you hired them with that understanding, why would you want to constrain thier ability to get thier job done the best way they know possible? If you're using SCRUM, then each developer will have chosen the work they feel they're able to do, your job as a Scrum-Master is to remove obstacles, not create them.
Code Reviews: Absolutely necessary. Peer reviews of code are a great teaching tool for junior developers attending meetings, and for the folks having thier code reviewed.
Design Documents: I personally feel that detailed design documents covering what the developer intends to do is very important, and I also feel they are an important part of the development process. Now, this is not specifically in-line with agile development, but I personally regularly refer back to design documents created years ago to see what the original developer was thinking when they coded their modules.
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Specifically, should you only accept new work you know the team can finish in the given iteration? Is it ok to start the next highest priority backlog item even if you know the team doesn't have time to finish it? Thanks!
We use the time to fix bugs, and to pay back some technical debt.
If you can do this without talking to your product owner depends on your understanding of scrum or your work arrangement with the product owner.
In my personal opinion you make a promise for the sprint. Your part of the deal is to hold the promise. The Product Owner on the other hand is supposed to stay out of technical stuff, since that's what the developers are good at. Technical Debt is technical stuff. Bugs might be. But in the end you have to come to a common understanding with the PO what you can decide on your own and what you have to consult the PO with. In an ideal world the developers know so much about the product that they can make the decision on their own.
Starting on the next item is of course another option. If you can't finish it, Lex Scrum says don't touch it. And I like this law to some extend, because it actually creates slack that can be put to good use by developers ... like fixing bugs and paying back technical debt. If implementing another story is the best use of your time: find one that you can finish. If you can't find/create one, this is actually an impediment that you just found. Assuming we are talking at least about something like 4hours for 2-3 developers, we really should be able to find something useful to implement with these resources, shouldn't we?
should you only accept new work you know the team can finish in the given iteration? Is it ok to start the next highest priority backlog item even if you know the team doesn't have time to finish it?
Remember "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" Do what your common sense tells you. Do not get too caught up in tools and processes.
As per the Scrum guide, the amount of work the Team commits to is completely up to the Team.
There is no harm in starting a next highest priority item when all the items above it are done. What would be preferable though is break the item down into a smaller or thinner slice which can actually be done.
If the Team finishes all it's Backlog Items well ahead of time, the team should definitely take up a few more.
I would take the next highest item in the backlog and work with the product owner on creating a story that can can be completed in this iteration...so break the story into a smaller size to fit.
We haven't taken new work irrespective of whether it can be finished within the sprint or not. You should instead focus on Technical Debt, Design Debt, Code Debt
Definitely break the story into something that fits. The team should never be committing to something it can't finish in a sprint. Additionally, only the team can add new work. If the team finishes early, the team needs to work with the Product Owner and agree to add work to the sprint. I've seen teams get into trouble when the "lead" or even the Scrummaster starts negotiating with the Product Owner outside of the team.
To answer the question definitively, Scrum says that you should negotiate with the Product Owner and about taking in extra work.
Scrum done well has the Scrum Team review their progress every day so you should see an early finish predicted way before it actually happens, giving you enough time to chat with the Product Owner about what to bring in to the Sprint.
Scrum done well also has the Scrum Team prepare User Stories well in advance of being pulled in to a Sprint (via Sprint Planning and Product Backlog Refinement) so the need to break a User Story into smaller components so they can fit in to a Sprint is lessened considerably.
Either you can break a story into a smaller one so you can deal with it within the current sprint or you can have a story informally split into two sprints putting off some of its tasks to the next one.
Remember that agile comes down to finding the best way to fit your team's needs, not about following structured rules.
Whichever way you go, I'd simply go to the team and ask them what do they want or think they should do. Remember, in Scrum we value self managing teams.
For suggestions, if they're stumped, I would say do one of the following:
Reduce technical debt
Use the time to learn something valuable
Let the team take a "Gold Card". They're on time, they probably earned it.
Split the next story into smaller (though still meaningful) stories, the first of which can be completed in time for the end of the sprint.
If the next story can't be completed as above, take the next story that can be completed in time.
Hope this helps,
Assaf.
Here's what my teams do-
First, it's up to the team to decide what additional work that they can fit into the remaining part of the sprint. It's critical that the whole team votes on this, not just the developers.
Second, if the team decides that they can handle X more points of work then they go to the PO and confirm the priority of the backlog items and find one or more stories that sum up to that X points. Sometimes they have to move down the backlog a bit to find ones that will fit. As long as the PO is ok with the final selection, the team moves forward with the new work.
Third, whatever new work the team selects has the same commitment level as the original work. Any partially completed stories at the end of the sprint are failed.
Finally, during planning for the next sprint, the velocity is adjusted upward (in this case) because it's quite likely that the team under-selected work at the beginning. This is a crucial point - the velocity should always reflect the team's best guess based on recent past history as to their work capacity. If the PO sees that the team is finishing early and heading off to do other non-backlog work, this can cause trust problems between the PO and the team. It's perfectly fine to decide as a team along with the PO to focus on technical debt (although I think that these are still stories since the work needs to be tested) or other items as long as there is discussion and agreement.
I think this is something you'll need to take a view on after a number of sprints. If you're regularly left with spare time at the end of a sprint, you should probably commit to more work in the planning session.
If it is happening rarely, I'd caution against routinely adding in tasks from the backlog as a matter of course. Unless you've done some decent backlog grooming they're unlikely to be the quick-wins they first appear. You also want to avoid a protracted mini planning session as those days you have free could quickly trickle away - especially if you're including the views of developers who have tasks outstanding.
By all means, seek to get ahead for the next sprint by reducing technical debt or backlog grooming etc but putting yourself on the back foot by committing to work late on is rarely worth the effort.
I think a solution of an under-committed sprint could be to stop the sprint. If the team has done the work then the sprint is over. The other option of adding more stories into the sprint backlog is too risky, and rarely will a team be 100% sure they can handle all the extra work.
As far as I know there is no rule that a (let's say, 2-week) sprint cannot be ended 2 or 3 days early.
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I recently interviewed with a company which has started introducing Scrum for their development cycles. I asked one of the developers how their experience has been, and it sounds like they are completely divested from the planning process. He wasn't allowed any input as to what went into a given Sprint, and didn't participate in any planning or grooming activities.
Basically, at the start of the last Sprint (or two) he was handed a to-do list. He had to breakdown items into their respective tasks (so they could be worked on over the Sprint), but wasn't involved in any planning activities; I'm skeptical he was allowed much input into how much effort an item might take -- I suspect the architects decided this for the team.
Is this how Scrum should be handled? My current team fully participates in all planning activities, continually adding our input as to how features may be addressed and how much effort they might take. I'm a bit skeptical (and nervous) about a company which simply hands developers a to-do list without asking for their input.
Note: I understand that once a Sprint starts, the list really is a prioritized to-do list. My concern is not having input into the planning process from the start.
If those who are doing the work don't get to give input saying what amount of work can fit into a sprint and let the business decide whats most important and should be scheduled to fit. Its not going to work run away. They are using new trendy agile words but doing the same old things.
(...) He wasn't allowed any input as to what went into a given Sprint, and didn't participate in any planning or grooming activities.
Obviously, they're still doing command and control and micro-management (the team is not empowered and self-organizing) and they are still using push-based scheduling (they didn't enable pull-scheduling).
Scrum has other characteristics but the above points are more than enough to say that they aren't doing Scrum, regardless of how they name it, they didn't really shift from the outdated waterfall approach (they just did put some lipstick on the pig).
This is a big hint that they're still totally clueless about what Scrum is about, they didn't get it at all. And this is not going to change without some inspection and adaptation, if they even want to change. If you don't have the power to make this happen, run away.
Is this how Scrum should be handled?
No.
I worked at a place that called themselves agile. They had 6-8 month release cycles. Some things came from a backlog, but during the "Requirements Gathering" phase, basically the managers would spend a week or two meeting with various people in the company, and write up a feature list. The first day of each 4 week "iteration", the dev team would all get together and break down everything in a series of meetings. The last day of the iteration was deployment day, where there would be an intrim deployment that nobody outside of the dev team ever saw.
During the 8 month release cycle, the managers would touch base with the stakeholders maybe once or twice in the last two months of the release, at which point the only issues raised in those meetings that had a chance in hell of getting done before release were issues that were bad enough to make the whole effort useless if they were not implemented.
This is not agile, this is a variant on waterfall with a poor choice of ideas and methodologies cherry picked from other methodologies. At the end of the day, it still has all the same problems that waterfall does.
The lesson I took from my employment there is that development methodologies include things for a reason. If you are cherry picking from a methodology without fully understanding it (and by fully understanding, I mean having actually worked with it), there is a high chance that you will not use something that is actually vitally important to the whole thing. For example, in xp, kent beck advocates relying on refactoring later as a way to cut down on up front design. However, the only reason this actually works is that he also advocates TDD and pair programming. If you have a comprehensive test suite and an extra set of eyes there for the whole thing, refactoring is fairly safe. If you just cherry pick the first part and leave those two out, you are essentially cowboy coding.
I am extremely skeptical of shoppes that roll their own methodologies for this reason. There are an absolutely shocking amount of crimes being committed in the name of agile.
Is this how Scrum should be handled?
Definitely not. Scrum strives to increase transparency. By blocking developers from planning activities, they are doing the opposite of what scrum suggests.
You talked about 2 points here:
1. Sprint Planning - The Scrum Team members should be Definitely required here.
2. Backlog Grooming - May or may not be required here. You have to use your resources wisely and with common sense. One team member with strong developer background would be okay here I think.
There is one more type in Scrum:
Release Planning - Some might say developers are not needed here. But as per the Scrum Guide - "Release planning requires estimating and prioritizing the Product Backlog for the Release". Well prioritization can be done by the POs and suggested by the stake holders, but estimating would be most accurate if it is done by someone who is actually going to do the work, so it is a good idea to involve developers here. Again, resources should be used wisely. If it makes sense to not involve all developers and have people rotate turns to estimate, that is not a bad idea.
I suggest follow this structure:
Sprint Planning - part 1 : Estimation and pulling backlogs in Sprint from product backlog (PO, SM and Team are pigs here)
Sprint Planning - part 2 : Tasking, estimating task hours and breaking them down. (SM, and Team are pigs, PO is chicken here unless PO is taking tasks as well)
It is up to the team to figure out, during the sprint planning meeting, how it will turn the selected product backlog into a shippable product functionality. If they are not part of this process then they would not be able to commit.
The answer to your title question is: Developers (team) must participate in planning meetings. Planning meetings are for developers (team).
The good approach is to have two planning meetings at the beginning of each sprint: Planning meeting 1 and Planning meeting 2. In Planning meeting 1 Product owner gives prioritized (and size estimated - size estimation is not done on planning meeting) product backlog to the team and team starts to discuss most prioritized user stories. For each disucssed user story team should be able to collect:
Detailed requirements (for example which fields the input form has to have ...)
Constraints (for example how fast the functionality has to be)
Acceptance tests (verification of results)
UI sketches (for example how should UI flow looks like)
Acceptance criteria (validation from end user - acceptance criteria doesn't have to be real test. It can be something related to "easy to use" etc.)
There should be time boundary for Planning meeting 1. Number of user stories you were able to discuss can correspond to number of user stories you will be able to complete in upcoming sprint. At the end of Planning meeting 1 team must make commitment - say how many of discussed user stories will be done in upcomming sprint. Sprint planning meeting 2 is only for team because team further discusses user stories and breaks them into tasks.
Generally, of course they should. Obviously, it's never realistically possible to the degree that developers would like. However, if sprints are usually "Hair On Fire" type affairs, where the developers get no serious input at all... then at the very LEAST there should be regularly-scheduled "entropy reduction" sprints, where all tasks are selected exclusively by the developers for the purpose of cleaning crap up.
At least some developers need to be there so work can be properly estimated and pipelined.
But not all developers need to be there. All can be there is it makes more sense.
On the other hand, developers need to understand that the business priorities are the priorities, no matter what they think should come next. Everyone has to work together ot make it work.
I'm not so much worried about my input, but about my insight. I recently was involved in a project where I had no knowledge of the project before the plans were handed to me supposedly complete. The nightmare started when I discovered that the process was not completely thought out and the data definitions were not complete. I wound up having to go through the whole process again to get the answers that I required.
The Team can be involved in the planning process without a formal process or meeting. The planning process is really very fluid. At the start, the goal should be to get to starting sprints ASAP. Spending too much time in planning before the first sprint feels very waterfall and is a waste of everyone's time. I, as a team member would feel relieved to not be a part of that, except for the fact that it indicates a dysfunctional nature to the organization. The Team should always be free to voice ideas on an ongoing basis (since that's when the real planning happens). But, 2 things you mentioned concern me most.
First, the Team should be the only ones to determine how many backlog items they can do this sprint. They certainly would be involved in estimating the effort. That's a big problem.
Second, the Team does not sound like they have access to the product owner (maybe there ins't even one here). Even if the team has not been involved in the "planning" thus far, surely if I were talking to the product owner in the planning meeting, or had access to them at other times, I would voice suggestions over time.
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Scrum and agile says that items on the current sprint backlog should be approached in priority order, and one item at a time by the whole team.
Practically, that never seems to work for our team. Either the item is too small for all team members to be productive (including taking pairing into account). So we end up perhaps doing two or three items across the team at any one time.
I'd be interested to hear how other teams do it, and also how many items they usually commit to in a given sprint.
items on the current sprint backlog should be approached in priority order, and one item at a time by the whole team.
I don't know who says this, I at least don't remember having heard or read anything like the emphasized text so far. Of course, it depends also on whether an item for you is a story or a single task.
If it's a story (usually consisting of several tasks), there might be a chance of achieving this. However, as you say, sometimes the story just doesn't include enough tasks to keep everyone busy. Also often the tasks related to a story strongly depend on each other, e.g. there might be a design session (involving part or whole of team), then one or more coding tasks, then code review, functional testing, documentation etc. Obviously one can't do functional testing before the coding, and so on.
Since everyone has to do something, there will be at least as many tasks open at any given time as there are team members (or pairs). Taking into account that sometimes tasks are on hold for various reasons (inter-task dependencies, information needed from external parties etc.), usually even more.
In one Scrum project with a team of 4 developers, we had a very similar situation. We did strive to take stories in priority order as much as possible, and usually we had multiple stories and several tasks open at any time. In the beginning we often had problems with several half-finished stories at the end of the sprint. So we realized it is important to keep the number of open tasks / stories to a minimum, i.e. always attempt to finish open tasks /stories first before starting a new one. But practically, that minimum was never meant to be 1.
As for the number of stories per sprint, we just put in as many as we could comfortably fit in based on our (story, then task level) estimations. That was of course greatly influenced by our velocity, which in the beginning was estimated too high. After a couple of months we chipped it down to 60%, and that value seemed to work for us.
The advice to approach each item by the whole team is there to avoid creating mini-waterfalls within sprints, where items are passed from one specialized group to another. That leads to stuff like testers having nothing to do in first days of the sprint, then working overtime for the last couple of days when coders fiddle their thumbs. Teams should approach the problem as a whole with everyone chipping in, even outside of their respective "specialization". Yes, coders can test, testers can code and both can design architectures etc. - and in the process learn something new (amazing). That is not to say everyone should be very good at everything - it is just to say attitude like "I don't test, I'm a coder" or "I won't write this script, I'm a tester" should have no place in a Scrum team.
It is also advised to tackle items one by one inside of sprint to make sure something is actually delivered at the end. Limiting work in progress (WIP) prevents situation, where everyone did some tasks on each item, but no item has been completed by sprint's end.
However, this shouldn't be viewed as advice, not a very strict rule. For example when you have two small stories and a team of 10 it probably doesn't make sense to have all of the team swarm on just one story.
Bottom line is: no one should tell the team how to divide work among themselves, but delivering what they committed to at Sprint Planning should be expected.
I think it depends on the makeup of your team. If you have a team where anyone can take on any given task within a user story, then this works well. If you do not, then there will likely be idle time for some individuals.
The point in working the user stories based on priority is simple... you get the highest priority user story completed first. This adds the most value from the perspective of the customer who actually set the priority.
As for how many user stories to commit to during a sprint, that depends on a few factors:
Team Availability, Team Velocity, and Sprint Duration. So, I'm not sure how much value you will get out of knowing how many stories other people tackle during a sprint.
Noel, is your team trained to work in a Scrum team ? I mean did you send them to Scrum Course prior beginning the project ?
I've seen so many team failing with Scrum just because they misunderstood what was written in a book on a blog.
Also having an experienced Scrum Practitioner or Scrum Coach will help you a lot.
To answer your question specifically, check this nice free ebook that is different than others:
http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf
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Given that the tasks in a specific sprint will not divide perfectly into the team, and all finish on the same date, what do you do to keep everyone working as the sprint moves into its final stages?
Inevitably it seems like there will be one or two people freed-up. If all the other tasks are done-done, and the remaining tasks are already underway, then what?
Do those team-members pick up items from the top of the product backlog, as they are likely to be needed in the next sprint anyways to get a head start?
What do you or your teams do?
My teams have always picked items up from the backlog, starting with the highest-priority items that can fit in the remaining time.
If nothing quite fits that criteria (as when there's only half a day left and/or no small stories to pick up), consider paying down some technical debt.
Scrum is done by teams.
If some people are done, they can help other members of their team.
They can also help their team by getting a head start on the next sprint.
They can also do some exploration of new technology, if that would help the team.
Or they could brush up their own skills, if that would help the team.
They could create training materials to help other members of the team improve their skills.
That's a team decision.
Pay down Technical Debt
Do anything that the team thinks should be done but doesn't belong on a card because there's no visible business value. Some people have called these tasks "technical stories". They tend to be things you should have done before Sprint 0, but didn't. Examples include adding of these that you don't already have to the build:
a Continous Integration server
a test coverage tool
static analysis tools
One thing I recommend is looking up future tasks and doing some detailed planning for estimates. This is non trivial and will take some time. Another is to scope of a new large scale project that can be broken into tasks and entered in product backlog.
Refactoring, writing unit-tests, improvement skills.
(...) what do you do to keep everyone working as the sprint moves into its final stages?
Nothing, I expect a self-organized team to find out this by themselves. And there are many options (by order of importance):
Help other members of the team to finish their stories (achieving the goal of the sprint is the most important, the whole team succeed or fail at this, not individuals).
Prepare a kick-ass demo.
Pick up a story from the backlog that can be done-done before the end of the sprint (i.e. not always the next highest priority items but something that fit in terms of size).
Repay technical debt if you have some.
Document things if this make sense.
Explore new things (tools, frameworks, testing techniques, etc) that may be useful for the team.
While it may seem obvious for team members to move on to the next highest items in the product backlog, I would advise against starting with this.
First and foremost, the teams' obligation is to achieving the sprint goal, so anything they can do to work towards that must come first (e.g. helping out testing, chipping in where possible, etc.).
Next, the team should look at expanding their definition of "done". Perhaps it currently doesn't include testing, or doesn't include some form of code review. Most teams starting with Scrum do not start with a definition of done that truly has a product increment that is ready to ship, so now would be the team to move towards that.
As others have mentioned, what tools do you need setup in order to get closer to a shippable state? Continuous integration? Automated acceptance tests? Now is the time to add these things.
Likely, you also have areas of the code that existed before you moved to Scrum and thus don't have very good test coverage or have accumulated technical debt. Now's the time to pay that off.
Also, as Mike Cohn suggests in his book Succeeding with Agile teams may want to reserve roughly 10% of their time for some look ahead planning. This may involve having a meeting with the Product Owner to discuss some up and coming stories for future sprints, breaking down larger stories into smaller ones, or for designers, perhaps doing some wire frames or mock-ups for upcoming stories.
Once you've gotten to this state, only then should you consider continuing on with the product backlog.
When there are team members that have completed there task early and find themselfs unoccupied there are a few things that can be done.
Make sure that estimation can be improved so hence planning can be improved. In doing this, bare in mind this estimation is very subjective. (However in my view underestimation is a situation we do not want to be in).
The scrum master has to bring in an ethos to the team of "Forwarding thinking"; improvements in oneself, in team productivity and the product or business the team is working on.
2.1. Try help out other team members task where possible to get stories Done (DOD) in the the sprint.
This could be pair work (pair programming)
As a programmer fixing other peoples bugs
etc etc
2.2. Try to help the scrum-master with other stories in he backlog. Check if any small story can be completed within the capacity of sprint making sure of it Impact to the sprint.
2.3. Work on research where there is a story in the backlog which is unclear. Do research on this story. Here a new story can be created with the emphasis on delivering research results. This story should be 0 points. programming prototyping etc can be done on the developers local PC without it being checked in.
2.4. Develop ones own skill either in there functional area (programming, testing etc) or the domain area.
The idea is a team that is performing. Each team member is dedicated to the goals of the team. So if you find yourself free...forward think how can i help the goals of the team.
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Agile/Scrum development is a very collaborative development process. e.g. it requires developers to continuously communicate & work closely together day-in day-out.
How do you handle your "off" days? Those days that you just don't have energy, can't think straight, don't really have anything to say at the standup meetings, etc.
Just like how athletes have their off days.
I don't think there should really be a day where you don't have anything to say at the standup meeting. Every standup meeting should be used to let the rest of the team know whether or not you met the prior day's commitments.
One problem that I have seen on a lot of agile teams is that the developers don't make concrete commitments on a daily basis, so the daily stand-ups aren't all that effective. If that is an issue, make sure everyone in attendance is setting out concrete goals on a daily basis that can objectively be communicated the next day as either done or not done.
To the rest of your question, I think it is perfectly acceptable to go into a daily stand-up and say that you didn't meet the prior day's objective because you had an off day and use the meeting as an opportunity to make new commitments. If there was a reason why you had an off day that could be clearly identified as an impediment (e.g. too many interruption, unclear requirements/objectives, dev environment frustrations), those reasons should be reported to the whomever is leading the stand-ups (scrum master) because it is their responsibility to make sure those impediments are addressed.
If you don't get anything done, say you couldn't focus and didn't get anything done at the standup meeting. The Scrum Master should try to find out of there is some factor that's distracting you, and try to remove it for you.
Also, if these "off days" are semi-frequent occurrences, try to figure out how often they occur, and include them in your estimates. Scrum is about what's really going on. It's about real timelines. If you know you have 4 off days in 4 weeks, then you should only be claiming 4 days a week worth of work, not 5. (That being said, it's possible that what you can do in 4 days is the same as what someone else can do in 5 days).
Pair programming makes it easier to handle. At least with pair programming, somebody else is there to catch your mistakes early.
Pick a different task/story to work on - so that you get a change on scene. Maybe you've been on the same user story too long.
Gold Cards - (or "fedex days") - where you can work on anything you want: http://www.planningcards.com/iterex/papers/InnovationAndSustainabilityWithGoldCards.pdf What's noticeable about "gold cards" is that the team that introduced them found that they didn't cause a drop in productivity. This would suggest that it's better to take somebody out of the process on an off day and let them do something constructive of their own choosing than let them work unproductively.
Depends if you're running the meetings, many people opt for the "Daily Scrum" whilst working on projects, but often they are time wasters and unnecessary. Structure your meetings around when things are completed, if you're completing and re-assigning tasks everyday, then yes, a daily meeting is a good thing, but realistically you can schedule and discuss a number of tasks in one meeting and then re-visit later in the week. Ideally the most efficient meetings usually consist of one weekly meeting (Monday) and quick progress catch up (Wednesday - Thursday). If you're the project manager, insist that team members respond to you directly when they complete work before the next meeting takes place. If you're holding official daily meetings, you're likely burn out with in a month! (and so are your staff). If you have to do daily meetings, make them quick catch ups, set at the same time everyday and only offer the most relevant information and only have one proper meeting during the week. If you'd like to know what to do on your "off days", I can only suggest that you cancel the meeting, take a Berocca, walk around the block, complete your filing and actually do some work instead of holding relentless meetings for a change.
G'day,
As mkedobbs mentioned, you should mention it in the stand-up meeting.
Maybe you need to look at what's making you have an "off" day and communicate that with your team members.
Is it due to you banging your head against a problem and you're losing motivation? Mentioning it in the stand-up may reveal another team member who has previously come up against the problem. They have maybe even solved it, or their experiences and observations may be slightly different to yours but the combination of two heads may solve the issue for both of you.
Is it due to your user story turning out to be much bigger than expected and you're feeling overwhelmed? Raising the issue in the stand-up will help resolve the problem. Maybe this particular user story should be considered a user theme or even a user epic and needs to be broken down into several user stories.
Is it because the user story you finished up with is not what you normally do? Discussing this in the stand-up may uncover team members that do have experience in the particular area covered by the user story. And those team members may be able to provide pointers to help you, maybe directly with the work itself, or with some other resources to help you come up to speed.
These are just a few reasons as to why your "off" day may be directly due to your current work. But definitely don't just stay silent though! Mention it at the stand-up so that any potential problems may be addressed sooner rather than later.
HTH
cheers,
I have off days. My team has off days.
If it is happening a lot or if it is the same people, then root cause and action is needed. This might be a good topic for a retrospective if the whole team is affected or one-on-one if it is an individual.
As for the answer, you are part of a team. The team picks up the effort, just like any other issue. If you team has issues with this, you probably don't have a well formed team and just have a bunch of individuals fending for themselves.
Generally at the start of an "off" day, it isn't clear that the day will go badly. It is only after a few stumbles that it becomes clear that it isn't going to be a good day. I'd still try to get something done but sometimes the progress is minuscule. The following day's stand-up is when to say, "Yesterday, I didn't get much done. I had an off day," or something similar to note that I do recognize that things didn't go well and I'd try to do better today.
Sometimes I'd change what I'm doing that day, as that can sometimes help. I have had times where I get a few off days in a row, which generally is indicative of needing to take a personal or vacation day and try to recharge myself to get back in the saddle again.