If your team is having trouble delivering the results within the management’s plans and the client expectations, then agile team management methodologies like the development sprint can help you get a lot more out of them. These are fixed intervals of time, anything from a week to a few months, where the team has identified a specific goal in advance and works almost single-mindedly towards it.
Defining the sprint goal
A good development sprint is ensured from the very beginning. The better defined the sprint goal, the more value the end results can offer. Your goals should be defined by the user stories that highlight specific issues and obstacles getting in the way of the software that your client or end user needs. Ensure that your team has a high-level understanding from the business perspective on the problem that needs to be solved, not just from the development perspective. Don’t neglect to ensure consensus with the business and/or task owner to make sure that your goals align with theirs.
Designing a good user story
User stories are a simple, yet powerful tool. They are the simple statements that serve as the focal point of the sprint, the one driving factor behind the work the team will be undertaking. User research is essential, as making up user stories based on what the team thinks they should work on can lead to poor alignment with the user’s actual experience, wasting time on work that perhaps shouldn’t be a priority. The user story should start with a single sentence that identifies three things: the user in question, the goal based on their wants, and why this would benefit them. From there, sprint plans should always elaborate on and refer back to the user story so that you’re certain your work is always on the right track.
Create a sprint backlog
From the story, your team should engage a collaborative process with the business, product, task owner to prepare candidate items for the sprint backlog: the list of tasks that are supposed to be completed during the sprint with the user story as the core principal behind all items. Once the team has finalised a sprint backlog, they should also complete lists of tasks and sub-tasks essential to completing them, offering clear, measurable, and deliverable terms on how the client needs are going to be met.
The sprint meetings
Making sure the entire team is on board with the sprint is essential. How your team handles this may vary depending on your needs, but an hourly meeting once a week is usually recommended. This allows enough time to see what backlog items have been cleared, any obstacles that need to be addressed, and to timeline the completion of future backlog items.
A development sprint allows your team to stay flexible, to react quickly and precisely to client needs, and to ensure productivity is always being used in the right direction. Hopefully, the tips help you get the most out of development sprints and use them in the way they’re supposed to be used.