Agile more Agile

I wrote this article on Agile because I have never found the same resource and I think it’s helpful to share his experience.

Agile ceremonies

• Standup 15min maximum every business days
• Grooming 1h maximum per sprint, stories must be prepared before the meeting. When the team review items on the backlog to ensure its contains the appropriate items, that they are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery on the next sprint.
• Retrospective 1h maximum per sprint, the most important meeting. The team reflects on what happened in the iteration and identifies actions for improvement going forward.
• Demo 3h maximum per sprint on Friday afternoon. Demo meeting is a time to showcase the work of the team.

Sprint duration

A sprint lasts 14 business days, starting from Monday to Thursday (almost 3 weeks). Every friday afternoon, the Agile demo take place.

There are basically 3 documents to fill for each sprint:

• Sprint metric
• Sprint report
• Sprint retrospective

Sprint metric

Scrum teams organize development into time-boxed sprints. At the outset of the sprint, the team forecasts how much work they can complete during a sprint. A sprint metrics report then tracks the completion of work throughout the sprint.

• Metrics of story point: 0.5/1/2/3/4/5 (no more no less)
• Story is created by business needs, acceptance criteria and definition of done
• Story point per people or/and average of the last 3 sprints: 5 SP (Story Points) per people
• Team Velocity, the consistency of the team’s estimates from sprint to sprint. Calculate by comparing story points completed in the current sprint with points completed in the previous sprint; aim for +/- 10 percent.
• We use UPIs for unplanned incidents. Dealing with unplanned work is a continuous challenge for most teams.

Sprint report

Thanks to Confluence, there is the graph representing the expectation (in black line) vs reality (in red line) as well as requests finished and unfinished.

Sprint retrospective

Retrospectives aren’t just a time for complaints. You should use retrospectives meeting to find out what’s working and not so the team can continue to focus on those areas, find creative solutions and develop an action plan.

Main topics are :

• summary of sprint metrics
• what did we do well?
• what should we have done better?
• actions plan
• top features for this sprint (ease demo meeting)

How do you manage Agile ceremony? Do you introduce more or less meeting and time?