How can you achieve a balanced sprint plan where plan meets actuals?
Create a game for your team to challenge themself and create a better team synergy
Given a nine days sprint, one day dropped for agile ceremonies, how can you “make sure” your team will make it to the finish line as planned?
The first goal is to make the plan manageable, controlled and accurate. Of course estimations are not accurate in nature and every developer have its own pace, so to overcome that problem, we will transform the estimation problem to provide stories not larger then three days.
3 days are a good number for a nine days sprint given an average of 3 tickets per person of up to 3 days, that already sound like a more reasonable challenge.
To get to a 3 days ticket is just a matter of running a sprint pre-planning meeting with all developers and playing poker planning, breaking the tickets to its smallest development pieces and considering each step of the development from setup, to implementations, unit-testing, pr’s, end-to-end. when a ticket grows larger then three day, we find ways to split it.
At sprint capacity three days ticket are easy to distribute between the team, you can even play with ticket size distribution with 3-2-1 instead of 3-3-3 if you need e.g. due to unexpected spill over (yes that can still happen due to unknowns).
Our team is composed of 4 sub-teams each focused on a different sprint goal, to get full and quick visibility of our progress with adopted the sprint report graph as our high level overview for the sprint progress and we challenge ourself toward the suggested line of progress
While that is nice for high level overview, is wasn’t enough to balance the team.
Development cycle is made out of cooperation between developers e.g. PR’s reviews, and the speed of moving particles plays a very important role here, it’s like a basketball game and the ball should move fast or you lose momentum. It’s doesn’t end at PR’s, you also need to pass thru PO & QA in similar reviews.
So we decide on a 3 ticks in the sprint, every 3 days we plan for ticket closure, QA, PO & dev are pushing the first, second and third rounds of the sprint to completion together.
Coordination is made in our sprint epic leader meeting, most days are just regular status meeting, but every 3 days we made sure all tickets of the current tick were completed or do accounting and rebalancing to make that possible again.
Accounting is another process we run at our meetings – accounting we call the a process that balance back the project to plan. It happens twice in the sprint and help instead of epic leaders meeting. Accounting helps us detect and handle unknown, we change the story, we break it again and move parts of it to new stories, we help the developer to take the right decision of what is MVP and what can be pushed to another version on time. Accounting also helps us make sure all time invested is logged and not spilled to another sprint. later in prioritization we can decide if we want to continue to that next version or delay it further.
Having that framework in place allow the team to work together and created a game for the development team, it gives the team better understanding of the importance of the speed of particles in the development cycle and create a mutual team goal and higher team synergy.