Ch 15: Leading Iterative System Development

How long are development sprints?

Typically one-to-four weeks

What are characteristics of development sprints in a agile team?

• Detailed requirements emerge near end of Sprint N, for sprint N+1

• Sprints are shorter to get frequent input on emergent requirements.

What are characteristics of development sprints in a hybrid team?

• Mostly BRUF with some correction/tweaks emerging during development in sprint reviews.

• Use longer sprints to help deal with feature and code base complexities.

How does a Agile team plan out sprints?

Allocates user stories and acceptance criteria to sprints! They allocate work to each sprint in terms of engineering tasks which are tasks to build technical components!

What is a Sprint Capacity?

It defines the total amount of work that can be done realistically in a given sprint.

How do you find maximum sprint capacity?

Team members x days or hours in sprint (ideal days of hours)

What is the general theme for actual sprint capacity?

Typically lower than maximum, due to absences, interruptions, and technical debt

What is a Sprint Burndown chart?

It is a graph that shows the estimated amount of work in a sprint on the vertical axis, and the day within the sprint on the horizontal axis. It is a key tool to describe and manage a sprint!

What is a burndown chart a key tool for?

Stand-up meetings!

What are stand-up meetings?

These are short meetings where team members come together and review work completed, planned, and obstacles to overcome. Useful for updating estimated days/hours of work remaining for each story or task. Useful for updating Burndown charts

What is best practice to do, after the end of every sprint?

It is best to Inspect-and-adapt, key questions are +PLUS (What went well?), DELTA (What can we improve) Actions, (What action to take in next sprint to improve the process?)

What goes on in a sprint review?

It is best go over what was actually planned to do at the initial start of the sprint, and what was actually delivered/completed, go over feedback from clients during their demos, and plan ahead for next sprint

What does a burndown chart lack in showing?

lacks in showing effort! hence why some days, estimated time to finish may increase the next day

What are Agile Task Boards

A column-based format for portraying the status of each story and task within a sprint. Each column represents a step toward completing the item. Each item is represented as a sticky note or card, which is moved from column to column as progress is made.

What is a Weekly Status Report?

It is a weekly summarization of project status, including scope, timing, budget, risks and issues. NOT AN AGILE concept and generally not tied to the sprint cycle!

What is a Monthly Steering Committee Report?

consists of a senior group of project leaders tasked with overall governance and project oversight; generally includes senior leaders who approved the business case project sponsors, and specific team leaders, such as product owner, scrum master, BA, and project manager. It is a higher level report and includes reminders of vision, orientation to risks and issues!

What are the two inspect-and-adapt methods?

Sprint retrospective: Which focuses one valuating and improving your team’s development process in future sprints

Sprint Review: In which you demonstrate the software to your client and gather feedback, informing your planning for sprints

What is IT Team Velocity?

Measure of how much work an IT team can complete during a single sprint or iteration in an Agile environment.

What is Scrum value?

This is the # of completed stories rather than individual tasks!

In an agile approach, what is considered countable progress?

When a user story or acceptance criterion is completed!

What is technical debt?

These are application problems that accumulate over time! It results from cutting corners, reduces capacity for new features,

What are engineering tasks?

These are tasks that build technical components to complete achieve a goal in a sprint (Tables, screens, logics, feature development, bug fixing, code refactoring, etc.)