Sprint Retrospective

Distributed Scrum Teams: Never End a Sprint on Friday

Scrum team members know that things get very busy near the end of an iteration. The coding and quality activities need to be wrapped up, demo preparation occurs, the sprint review is held, the sprint retrospective is held, and the next sprint planning meeting is held.

If the onsite team team prefers to end iterations on Friday, they might naturally assume they have all day Friday until evening for these activities.

However, look at what that would do to a remote sub-team in India – it would mean working until early hours on Saturday morning. A better practice is to split the end of sprint activities across two days, ideally during the overlap time dedicated for sub-team synchronization. This insures minimal impact to normal working hours at the end of each sprint.

5 WHYs: Positive Root Cause Analysis To Find Good Practices

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my earlier article I shared my opinion about using 5 WHYs to find root causes. What I really missed to point was, it is not just applied to find root cause to problems, but it can be used to find root cause to good things that are happening on the team.

In sprint retrospectives we usually pick some problem that occurred, try to figure out why it happened, and then understand how we could prevent this problem from happening again in the future. Our root cause analysis meetings are usually always on “What is That Not Going Well”.

Now let’s apply 5 WHYs thinking to this question…

5 Whys: Sprint Failed – Team Did Not Deliver Committed Work

by Avienaash Shiralige 9 Comments

Applying 5 Whys is a good way to address the problems that you are facing on your teams. This thinking is very simple, just ask WHY multiple times till you reach to root cause. You can read more about 5 Whys here.

Some benefits of using this Lean technique are:

Helps identify root cause of a problem
Determine the relationship between different root causes of a problem
Very simple to use without any statistical analysis
Very useful when problems involve human factors or interactions

Asking 5 times WHY generally leads you to a root cause. In some cases you may reach in fewer iterations and in some it may take more than 5.

Now let’s apply this technique to our problem on hand.

Problem: Team failed in their sprint as they were not able to complete all the work committed.

How to Use Sprint Burndown Chart in Daily Stand-up and Sprint Retrospective

by Avienaash Shiralige 1 Comment

Sprint Burndown chart and Daily Stand-up help Scrum teams in Self-Organisation. Never use Sprint burndown chart in sprint review. Sprint Burndown is inward facing, i.e it is for Scrum Team.

This chart summarise overall how team is doing? Every impediment, every challenge team faced, colloboration issues etc all get summarised in this chart. Teams need to update the tasks with time remaining in hours to get this chart. Scrum Master prints and analyses this updated Burndown before daily stand-up and brings it to the meeting.