Sprints
I know I have talked a bit before about sprint but this entry is all about sprints. As you may know or remember, they usually last between two to four weeks and the team guarantee the completion of a sprint target. At the beginning of a sprint the team will usually meet with the stakeholder to plan the next sprint. There are two meetings, the print prioritization meeting and the sprint planning meeting. I know, it looks the same but it is really important to do these two meetings because they have different functions. The former meeting is to go over the prioritized items on the product backlog and find a good sprint goal. It is during this meeting that the team can ask any questions regarding the design of each item in this sprint. Some items in the backlog product might be too long to do in one single sprint, like creating a multiplayer mode or Co-operative play, these attributes will be broken down into smaller items that will fit in the sprint. After this meeting, the team is not yet committed to do any of the product backlog items, they have only identified which one they might be able to do. It is during the sprint planning that they will give an estimate of how long each task will take. In this meeting everyone has to be involved, from the Scrum Master to the product owner and also if necessary they might invite some experts on the subject to answers any enquiries or help evaluate the work. During this meeting the Scrum Master will help the team find any constraints that will impact the team. It might be from Holidays such as Christmas, spring break, impacts from other specialties like the integration of a new engine or even some team members that have other commitments. How the team's ability to do work is mainly based on their past performance because it is the only way we can see how fast they have done some work. So if during a previous sprint, the team was able to do 200 hours of work then it is unreasonable to give them more than this amount of hours. The 200 hours becomes the limit the team can produce. Experienced team will perform any of the activities and sub-activities, coding, testing, designing etc, in parallel compared to a team beginning with the agile methodology. The product owner presence is really important because it is during this reunion that they might discuss probable switches in the game and design. Once they have calculated all the time it takes for them to complete the tasks, then they might want to check if they are doing enough work with some spare time for unforeseen events and tuning. If they have not enough work then they might consider adding one item from the product Backlog and if they have too many items, then they might want to remove some items. That is basically what we need to know about sprints to fully understand how Scrum works. Especially since it on a 2 to 4 weeks in a sense iteration.
