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Advantages of 1 week sprints
Where I work there has been a lot of movement towards creating an agile development environment. I believe that the process of transitioning into agile is unique for each company or group that makes that commitment. Something that I noticed, which isn’t really unique in the agile world, is that short sprints have a lot of advantages. I realize that there are a lot of projects/bugs/features that may require sprints longer than one week, but I think a push to shorten sprints could be advantageous in developing quality.
Iterate!
(Not to be confused with irritate…)
In software development there is a lot of emphasis on iteration. Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!
Iterating on a project is one of the aspects that allows agile to work so well. So in the beginning we tried 4 week iterations, thinking that longer sprints would ease the transition from our previous development process, which was a scrum hybrid environment, and already in a 4 week cycle. What we discovered after about two iterations(two months) was that these longer iterations didn’t seem to be working as well as we had hoped. They seemed to help with the transition somewhat, but as time went on a lot of us wanted to switch to the shorter sprint. One reason was that we realized that a lot can happen in four weeks when it comes to requirements, direction guided by business needs and critical defects. So in our particular case the biggest advantage to one week sprints was the tremendous increase in…
Flexibility!
Flexibility is the name of the game for a lot of companies, which is probably why they were even looking at agile in the first place. It’s also very useful in an environment with a lot of legacy software that needs to be supported. The flexibility is that if there is a product used inhouse in which a defect crops up then it’s only 5 days(max) until the defect will be addressed. That’s assuming that the defect isn’t a show stopper.
Sometimes business priorities change more often than once a month, especially in the software world. Sometimes these changes in direction can greatly alter the course of the project, even possibly rendering some portion of the project obsolete. With short iterations you can absorb these changes and change course with less wasted time and development on the project.
With one week sprints you also have an advantage of packing four retrospectives into the a space where we originally only had one. Doing this allowed us to critique our process more quickly and implement changes to improve performance.
This leads me to my next opinion based advantage of short sprints…
Reflection!
Reflection in agile is very important so that you can look back over the previous sprint and discover information that you can use to improve the following sprint.
In contrast to what I was explaining above, another thing that is very useful in short sprints is the ability to revert a change that you’ve made in the process promptly and wisely. If at the beginning of a sprint your team has decided to change a process based on feedback from a retrospective and you discover that the change actually turns out to be a detriment to the process then you can drop it and re-evaluate the change in a few days. So while you are iterating on your software, you are also iterating on the process too.
So to condense my thoughts here, I’m going to tell you something that you’ve probably heard over and over again…
Three Do’s!
- Do…iterate!
- Do…be flexible! AKA iterate often and be open to changes. (I know “do” doesn’t fit here..give me a break
- D0…reflect! So you can make your process better!
