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Allowing the team to "own" a sprint
Hello All,
We have recently began the transition to Agile and are considering trying a few different techniques. One of them that I was very interested in was allowing the team to take ownership of a sprint (planning, estimating and executing). They would do this on an interval of some sort, say 1 out of every 4 sprints. This would allow the team to take ownership of a small project within that time to do what they want but they would still be responsible for delivering something of value at the end. This may be a prototype of new technologies, researching new testing methods, re-factoring troublesome parts of the code to make their life easier, etc.
I'm interested to hear from others who have tried this or are considering trying it. What are your experiences with this, how did the team accept it, did the company react negatively to it, what did you gain from it, how did you get buy in, etc.?
Thanks!
We have recently began the transition to Agile and are considering trying a few different techniques. One of them that I was very interested in was allowing the team to take ownership of a sprint (planning, estimating and executing). They would do this on an interval of some sort, say 1 out of every 4 sprints. This would allow the team to take ownership of a small project within that time to do what they want but they would still be responsible for delivering something of value at the end. This may be a prototype of new technologies, researching new testing methods, re-factoring troublesome parts of the code to make their life easier, etc.
I'm interested to hear from others who have tried this or are considering trying it. What are your experiences with this, how did the team accept it, did the company react negatively to it, what did you gain from it, how did you get buy in, etc.?
Thanks!
Views: 13
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ilja Preuß on -
Never tried a whole sprint - sounds like a hard sell to me. Not sure how I would feel as a PO not getting any of my priorities worked on for a week or longer.
What we are doing for quite some time now is a day of "work on what you want" every month. I could easily see how doing it more often than that might be valuable. See http://iljapreuss.blogspot.com/2008/05/workation-day-adapting-googl...
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Permalink Reply by Urs Enzler on -
We do a little bit of this every sprint.
Because we have to do some manual testing of our sprint product increment (due to real hardware) to ensure quality, most of the team members have about 1 day at the end of each sprint to work on things like improving tools or their integration, refactoring, check out something new and so on.
This "improvement day" helps us to get more effective over time and to minimize technical debt.
Cheers,
Urs
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Permalink Reply by Agile Developer Notes on -
See article(http://www.agiledevelopernotes.com/2011/08/transitioning-to-agile-d...) on highlighting various things to consider while transitioning to an agile method.
It is a brief article, but is quite helpful for someone who is looking for a start.
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