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Motivation for Sprint Zero in a software project
Sprint 0 can be a great mechanism in Agile transformations not to only establish new teams, but also to reset existing ones undergoing a significant team altering event. You may have assumed that the key focus of a Sprint 0 is to generate a detailed initial backlog, plan for the first couple of sprints and decide when your ceremonies occur. Dec 01, · Steps to Use Sprint Zero in Scrum. Now that you have an idea about Sprint Zero’s benefits, let us understand how it can be implemented: Step 1. The first step for Sprint 0 takes place even before forming a team. It involves finalizing items like: Programming language. Design outline. Framework. Database. Needed skills. Resources. Product objective. Apr 24, · It is true that there is no concept of Sprint 0 in Agile world, however, there got to be a time period kept aside for these initial setup activities and you may call it Sprint 0 or whatever name.
Antipattern of the Month: Sprint Zero – DZone Agile.Sprint 0: The Goal, Activities and the Term | Agile Forest
How do we start sprinting effectively? We all appreciate the support given by experienced individuals when we start our own Agile journey. However, when we transition to a role of guidance, how we start a new team delivering quality software every iteration, or even resetting an existing team with bad habits, is a less well-known construct.
Here I intend to regale the tale of orchestrating my first Sprint 0 to reset an existing team, and the various twists and turns through Sprint 0 and onwards to our first effective review. The story begins by outlining the challenges this team faced with client engagement and delivery.
I will outline the major events alongside these issues that triggered the need to plan a Sprint 0. Walking through the story of the key ceremonies we undertook as part of the Sprint 0 process will form the main part of this tale. Finally, I shall end on a high discussing the first sprint review undertaken by the team that denoted the successful transition from Sprint 0 into regular client feedback and engagement.
Once upon a time, in a large investment bank, a merry band of developers and their friendly neighborhood Scrum Master were struggling to find their purpose. I had transitioned into this team as a combined Scrum Master and Team Lead at the start of The PMO group had responsibilities for eliciting business requirements, coordinating with IT on estimates, and providing regular updates to senior business stakeholders on all IT projects currently underway.
Initial grand promises of a strongly collaborative and engaged pair of shared product owners turned out to be a mere fantasy. By my second week, the product owner duo, Malcolm and Jayne, raised concerns that this team was not delivering the product the organization desperately needed.
As a result, they ceased to attend the ceremonies, meaning the team no longer had dedicated time with either product owner to ask questions or raise concerns. To bridge the gap a couple of users were made available to direct questions to. Their insights were great, but they did not have the authority to make any decisions on the product direction. This event marked the start of a rough few months for this team.
Without dedicated time from knowledgeable product owners, the team struggled to fill the gap by delivering what they understood to be required. This gap led to further concerns that the team was still not delivering the product the organization desperately needed. And so, we continued around the delivery discontent cycle with clients unhappy at the state of delivery, and the team unsure of the direction in which they needed to go. Senior stakeholders felt they still were not getting the value they needed, and the team struggled to fill the gap by delivering what they understood to be required without a common vision.
A further complication that widened this divide was the experience of the developer group. I was not the only one new to the area. Several new developers had joined the team over the last few months as well from a mixture of internal and external sources. This meant there was a high learning curve for almost half the team not only in the technology stack, but also product expertise and business knowledge. Like her predecessors Malcolm and Jayne, she possessed a strong knowledge of this domain and a mandate to provide the required authority for prioritization of capabilities.
Unlike Malcolm and Jayne, she could dedicate slightly more time to the team for feature discussion, provided a single point of contact and could build and communicate a new roadmap and set of objectives to give the whole team a sense of purpose that aligned with the needs of the users. This was no random act of good fortune. In terms of the wider department, our area was at the beginning of a journey where a set of Agile coaches were launching a campaign to establish best practices within the business area this team resided.
This Sprint 0 marked the start of a wider effort to re-establish each team within their business domain. While the campaign started in the background, this team led by example as the first to go through a Sprint 0 to reset their alignment to the product vision. At the time this was seen as a welcome change in circumstances.
Nevertheless, it introduced a new set of challenges. Most notably, how are we going to work together to fulfil the high expectations of this new product vision? Unlike the traditional justification for engaging in a Sprint 0 to set up a brand-new team, this situation is unusual. I had only ever heard stories of this technique being used to help a new team establish their product vision and ways of working. Excluding the new additions, the team had been established in some form for around one year.
This exercise aimed to reset the existing team that was going through the changes in circumstances. This was the first Sprint 0 that many of us had been involved in. Sprint 0 is defined as a short increment to set up the team for future delivery.
Initially, I assumed that setting out the product vision and an initial plan for the first few sprints would be sufficient.
However, as you will come to see through this journey, there is more to setting up a team for successful delivery than just a product backlog and roadmap! The initial kickoff with management highlighted early that this situation would introduce challenges. Our first meeting to determine the approach demonstrated this quite clearly. At the time it was unclear what sessions we would need for our resetting objective. The reality is that all individuals in this story, including Bridget and myself, did not understand what was involved in a Sprint 0, making it difficult to estimate the time required without further research.
As an organization, we are in the middle of an Agile transformation. Given the size of the company and the scaling efforts required, there are many internal resources designed to help educate us and support us when transforming teams. Much of our internal documentation was purposefully vague to ensure groups had the flexibility to include sessions they thought to be relevant to their situation.
It also uses language and scaling constructs common to our company that often make it difficult to determine if this is an adaptation specific to us or used industry wide. It was only after I had completed my first Sprint 0 that I found through outside research that there are resources discussing what elements are useful to include, as well as opinions on their place in Scrum due to special treatment and lack of a deliverable benefit [1].
The best resource turned out to be seeking advice from those who have already done it. I found that the best source of information turned out to be not necessarily the documentation. He shared with me his meeting timetable, the outputs of those sessions and decks that they used to support their discussions.
It is very much true that the experience of others is one of the best sources of information! Through the guidance of Derrial and Jerry and coordination with Zoe to understand what sessions she wished to include I became more confident in which forums the team required to generate a shared way of working with Zoe. Across the sessions we wanted to cover the following topics:. Tooling session to discuss and agree which software to use in our daily work for story capture, work management and general communication.
After discussion we also decided to add business knowledge shares, conducted by Zoe. These training sessions gave an overview of the financial products the system under construction intended to capture. They also gave an insight into the typical day in the life of key users, or personas, of the software the team are building.
One item that was purposefully left off this list was dedicated Scrum training for the team. Jerry and I arranged for Zoe to attend Product Owner training available via the centralized training service.
Additionally, we took Zoe through some additional material in our own time. The remaining team members were encouraged to enroll in any Agile training they felt was appropriate, with a brief overview of the Scrum ceremonies planned for the start of the ceremony calendar session.
However, for any teams going through Sprint 0 that are new to Scrum, I would recommend including training meetings. I will be honest; I was reluctant to start arranging meetings while still planning out the content. Despite the support from Jerry and Derrial, it was still not quite clear whether I had all the elements required to ensure the team could start sprinting effectively once we completed Sprint 0. Despite this newfound confidence, scheduling meetings was not as straightforward for this team.
The developer population was split between India and the UK. With Zoe being based in North America, that meant we had a short overlap of a couple of hours each day in which to host any shared Sprint 0 activities. The preparation work involved for each assembly also proved difficult to juggle with deliverables. Throughout the transition the developers and myself were participating in Sprint 0 discussions as well as continuing to deliver features off the existing backlog.
It could have been a good idea to pause this activity given the new vision being set out by Zoe may not have aligned to these items. It may have been possible to focus on reset activities only. However, with the team being distributed across three time zones there would most likely have been idle time for the developers if they did not continue to work on delivering features in parallel.
The final calendar of sessions, along with the purpose of each meeting, is presented in Figure 1. It is important to note that nine business knowledge sessions were conducted by Zoe as the sessions were limited to 45 minutes to both allow for discussion as well as cover the material in digestible increments. The team norms, or working agreement, generation proved to be of particular importance.
The team were distributed across the globe and juggling personal schedule challenges due to the pandemic that needed to be accommodated. This ensured that our availability and communication preferences accommodated the commitments of all team members. The definitions of ready and done were also important for establishing how we wanted to work together.
Due to the related nature of these artefacts, it was initially decided that these would be built together as part of a single discussion. This plan changed when we ran out of time in the combined session, leading to an additional meeting being scheduled for the next day. In addition to these shared sessions, Zoe, Simon, Jerry, and I were working in the background to set up the agreed tooling for housing our stories and tracking our work to align with the new system.
This tooling was being rolled out across the department to all teams. As the team was unfamiliar with this tooling, a demo was added to the communication session to show them how to use the tool. Most forums generated the expected output. The start of each session focused on educating the entire team on what artifact we were generating together and how it related to agile practice using slides and diagrams. Using the interactive whiteboard feature in Zoom to elicit any interactions from team members made it easier to centralize their feedback in the artefacts that we shared on our common document space.
One example where the use of an interactive whiteboard worked well is when building our team norms. For those unfamiliar with the term, team norms, or working agreements, are the set of defining principles that govern how we want to work together. These norms are people rather than process centric. In our case, when building the team norms together, we started with a discussion on what a working agreement was, and how it could be used to help the team establish how they want to work together.
From there we then collected all items together using a whiteboard and then I took all feedback and converted it into an editable document in our shared document space that could be amended later as the team faced challenges and amended their ways of working.
The team came up with some great suggestions for our working agreement, with my favorites being:. The discussion that proved to be most challenging was the ceremony calendar sitting.
This was the first where we ran out of time. Another issue we faced in this meeting was that we did not have an idea of the schedule for key stakeholders that we wanted to attend the sprint review.
Agile sprint zero activities
Sprint Zero is also called as Iteration Zero. Activities listed below will make the team ready for the sprint 1. It is a kind of the preparation. Sprint Zero: The Fundamentals · Preparing a list of prioritized stories and features with estimates. · Formulating a release plan, aligning the. › agile-blog › the-concept-and-execution-of-sprint-z.
Agile sprint zero activities. What Is Sprint Zero?
› agile-blog › the-concept-and-execution-of-sprint-z. Sprint zero activities · Backlog updated · Sprint planning session ensues · Daily Sprint team meetings · Sprint review sessions or debrief.