Sprint zero deliverables. Sprint 0 – our best practices
Looking for:
The Concept and Execution of Sprint Zero — Clearly Agile - Debunking Sprint Zero myths |
- Sprint zero deliverables
To gather this information from the customer, we can perform a business interview based on the business model canvas' relevant streams or asking the 5Ws of the business. The main objective of the second stage of sprint zero is to translate the business requirements into functional needs from a user-centered point of view.
For this need, we are focusing the working sessions on two main works: user flows and user story map. The USM is a great technique we use transversally when we work with products, but I'll talk about this in future posts. The deliverables of this phase are both a users flow and user story map board validated with the stakeholders.
We like to use Miro so we can keep it alive with customers' feedback and comments. The key result at this stage is to build an interactive prototype and define a solution architecture to base the application. On the technology side, now that we understand both the business and the product, we can draw a solution architecture drawing the IT infrastructure with the requirements registered from the customer and our advice - you might have your favorite cloud service provider.
The deliverable is a product backlog detailed at the user story level, ideally with the suggested implementation and acceptance criteria, organized by product releases or feature roadmap. Now both the squad and the stakeholders can have a more accurate scope of the product development phases that unlocks time and money questions that arise during the first steps of a new business.
Some customers may have a clear vision and definition of the business to work throughout a traditional process of requirements gathering and request for proposal. But those, innovative ideas, that are looking to become a reality, and have an impact on thousands of business users need a curate phase due to understanding the right problem we are solving for them.
Founders or decision-makers that have been through sprint zero or related methodology, confess to feeling more prepared to start a new business or initiative in their companies, even if the development phase is delayed. For teams, developers and designers feel more confident and motivated with the product development phases, not only by having a detailed registration of tasks but having been working in their specialty and plugin those skills into the sprint zero execution and delivery.
We help fact-checkers to uncover fake news with AI chatbots and conversational platforms. Discover here success stories of AI for verification Maldita's award-winning AI assistant, the start of a collaboration based on journalistic excellence and next-generation conversational technology.
Mariano Morera Jun 10, What's Sprint Zero? Consider Planning and adding items to the backlog during a Sprint Zero actually go against Agile principles that caution against big design up front.
Moreover, a Sprint Zero group is likely comprised of high level thinkers who may not be a part of other Sprints. If they take on the initial backlog setup this could result in an Agile organization being siloed into a hierarchy. Perhaps the most important rule of a Scrum Sprint is to produce usable code. This results in teams that are less confident in what to do next. The main goal of a Sprint Zero is to deliver some usable value that can be built upon by the next team.
Sprint Zeros are required to:. For this approach to work, there should be a few stories in the backlog prior to the start of the Sprint Zero — just enough for the Sprint to result in a product that can be demonstrated.
To better understand what a Sprint Zero is and how it differs from a traditional Scrum Sprint, one must look at goals, activities and benefits of a Sprint Zero. Like a Scrum Sprint , the main goal of a Sprint Zero is production. But a Sprint Zero is not required to do as much intensive software development as a Scrum Sprint.
In fact, Sprint Zero teams should keep it light as mentioned above. Because the emphasis of a Sprint Zero is to ensure readiness for a Sprint, some organizations or projects will not need to incorporate this approach.
If your company has been churning out successful Sprints in recent projects, you might already know your Sprint readiness situation without conducting a Sprint Zero. But unlike other Sprints, Sprint Zeros should not be longer than a few days; a week maximum. The main benefit of a Sprint Zero is that it allows a team to get an idea of the work ahead of them. They can then self-organize in order to perform better in the long run. This also builds confidence in team members that they can handle the work to come.
When individuals go into a project without clarity, they are likely to become slowed at some point which could affect the success of a Sprint. Sprint Zero seeks to avoid this obstacle by offering an opportunity to plan a framework for success and ensure a working Sprint environment.
Readiness means that an environment exists in which development can occur. Pre-planning is important to the execution of any project. The meeting should spark conversations between the Product Manager, Developers, and QA, as they work through issues, dependencies, and risk in order to finalize the release plan. Now the whole Design Team works together on the following deliverables….
Conduct User Research Building amazing products requires deep knowledge and understanding of the people you are building the product for. The optimal method for gaining insights is to engage with customers directly: talk with them about their common tasks and goals, background, and influences, as well as have them provide feedback — capturing their feelings, likes, dislikes, and ideas — on one or more prototypes.
The rule of thumb is to test each opportunity with at least 15 end users in order to see a trend in the feedback data. Take a lot of notes. Record these interactions if possible. Develop User Personas The purpose of User Personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments to help guide your team through key product decisions. Your Personas should be based largely on qualitative research, so get off your butts and go talk with your users!
You can also gain insight into users with quantitative user research via surveys, analytics, etc. I recommend creating Personas for the primary target audiences for the product, focusing on the most important segments. The goal of Personas is not to represent all audiences or address all needs in the product, but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups.
The key aspects of a Persona include:. Utilizing the analysis from the user research in Sprint 0, the Design Lead can develop the highest priority user flows as well as a few UX templates e.
Home page, Content page, etc. It will serve as the initial user experience hypothesis, that the design team can utilize for design iterations and testing, where it can include a few of the following: content layout and structure, navigation, user flows, etc. Next, imagine your product is human, and select a specific archetype from the list below that best reflects the character you want to reflect or develop one of your own :.
Sprint zero deliverables
Any work that must be done before a Sprint is not therefore a Sprint, and it ought to be minimized as far as possible. Indeed, Professional Scrum training currently remonstrates against any use of the term "Sprint Zero".
For example the Scrum. C Overall planning, base system architecture, base design, version control and continuous integration setup. D Establish base system architecture and design, install version control and continuous integration setup.
Now, the bald claim that a zero-indexed Sprint cannot even exist may seem rather harsh. After all a Scrum Team may describe or number a Sprint in any way it cares to That's the critical problem with "Sprint Zero" though. A sham Sprint, where no releasable value is provided at all and only setup work is undertaken, is endemic along with that particular term which is used to describe it.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the "Sprint Zero" antipattern is indeed head-on, and to dismiss the very artifice out-of-hand. Is it truly an antipattern though?
It's important to distinguish an antipattern from something which we may just not happen to agree with. There should be more bad consequences deriving from an antipattern than any good ones, and a solution to the problem ought to exist. The weakening of empirical process control, and the delayed delivery of value, might reasonably be identified as negative outcomes of a so-called "Sprint Zero" when all we get out of it is a fake agile wrapper for set-up work. There is also a danger in norming the idea of a Sprint which does not yield a product increment.
Mike Cohn has objected to Sprint Zero on these grounds. Mike thinks it's important to understand "why having something potentially shippable is a central tenet of Scrum". He opines that this tenet should be applied in an "honest" way. Perhaps it's this sentiment which really gets to the heart of the matter. A Sprint which does not yield an increment of empirical value cannot really be a "Sprint". Even if nothing else about it were held to be objectionable, the subversion of the term for non-shippable work is inherently dishonest.
Any Sprint which does not deliver an increment of value, no matter how small, ought then to be dismissed as a canard. The ability to exercise empirical process control will simply not be there. Yet a "Sprint Zero" will often be appealed to on the grounds of pragmatism and the lack of a clear alternative. Indeed, the concern of what to do about pre-delivery initialization does not go away just because the term "Sprint" ought not to be commandeered for it. What about those many things which must be done before any "real" value can be evidenced?
Essential precursory activities can include the drafting of a Product Backlog, the determination of architectural foundations, the resourcing of infrastructure, and the recruitment of those agile team members who would deliver value in the first place. There can be many enablers to agile practice which must be brought into play. What then is the solution for dealing with them? Part of the answer, of course, lies in minimizing start-up work as far as possible. The longer the empirical delivery of value is put in delay, the greater the leap-of-faith we will need to take when making any investment.
We can call a set-up stage whatever we like, but not a Sprint. It is the minimum enabler to start Sprinting properly. If it is envisioned that multiple teams must work on a product, think about commencing real development with just one of those teams in place. Concentrate on ensuring that good agile hygienes are practised by just one team first, and only then think about scaling an initiative up. Consider the possibility of starting the first Sprint with just enough work articulated in a Product Backlog to frame a Sprint Goal which empirically validates the proposition, and then evolving the rest of the backlog on a just-in-time basis.
Accept - from the very beginning - that architecture really ought to be emergent, and that frequent refactoring is not wasteful but a core development discipline. Above all, start thinking about each deliverable in terms of an experiment and a learning opportunity. That is, after all, the true nature of a Minimum Viable Product. An MVP isn't something which necessarily represents an offering with a revenue stream.
It's a tool for validating any assumptions you might make, and for minimizing stakeholders' leap-of-faith about the opportunity they've been invited to buy into. Don't therefore be afraid to plan substantial initialization work into the earliest Sprints.
It could still represent the greatest part of the undertaking. The key thing to remember is that each increment must provide some functionality, no matter how trivial it may be.
A skilled Scrum Team will select that functionality so as to validate the foundations which are actually being laid. This could be a transactional user story or "tracer bullet" which demonstrates that essential architectural layers are in fact working. The toxicity of a "Sprint Zero" doesn't lie in the fact that set-up work is being undertaken. Rather, it's the lack of validation and empirical control. That's the problem. Paradoxically, that's also what makes the scrubbing of Sprint Zero so hard in many organizations.
The concern for empiricism just isn't there, and agility degenerates into a game of mapping and illusion. The following article will help you understand this controversial process and its value. Agile splits the project management process into easily manageable sections called Sprints.
Every Scrum Sprint must be delivering value and reach a certain goal in weeks. During this time, an assembled development team is trying to create a particular piece of functional code that is ready to be tested and used. When one sprint ends, the backlog is updated so that the process can start again until the software development is done and the product is ready for release.
However, there are two opposite approaches to this topic. Some Sprint Zero enthusiasts describe it as a stage in which a new development team works on a clear goal to set up the foundations and build an environment for the whole project. On the other side, there are software developers that perceive it as a major mistake.
In their opinion, Sprint Zero is the initial Sprint that should focus on the same principle as any other Sprint — developing functional code. Pre-planning is an essential part of any project management. Standard preparations for the product development process include gathering the team and necessary equipment.
Many Scrum professionals believe that those steps should take place during Sprint 0, while others perceive it as a wrong approach. They bring to attention the point of the Scrum framework — delivering value in fast, iterative cycles. How those different approaches affect the work scope for Sprint Zero?
Although Sprint 0 is one of the shortest sprints in the whole project, it has an extensive work scope. Its main goal is to prepare the entire architecture and environment for future software development. In this approach, the deliverables of a Sprint Zero should be as follows:.
According to this approach, the main goal of a Sprint 0 is to deliver the first version of the product that the team could demonstrate.
At this point, the design is as minimalistic as possible. It is important to keep low velocity and lightweight. In summary, during Sprint 0, the product development team works on:. There are no one-size-fits-all ways to work, and that is why there is so much controversy around Sprint 0. Some believe that it goes against basic Agile principles and has no place in the Scrum framework, but in reality — there had to be a problem that led to a solution.
The challenge for the management is to kick-start the project. All Sprints are focused on delivering value, starting with Sprint 1. It is not possible without the proper amount of work in the product backlog or dedicated environment. Every team needs time to set up for success, so when the time comes for Sprint 1 planning , they are ready.
It is the value of Sprint 0. Sprint Zero provides time and space to ensure that the foundations are done right from the beginning. It saves the management from repeating the same mistakes and secures success in the future. The main benefit of first Sprint is that team members can get guidance and clarity before software development begins.
It helps them build confidence and better self-organize, leading to a high level of efficiency throughout the project. Sprint Zero helps to avoid slowing down during the critical stages of a project by offering an opportunity to plan a solid framework and ensures a great working environment. Sprint 0 carries undeniable value when used correctly.
It is not the solution for every software development team, every project, or every company.
Comments
Post a Comment