Sprint Best Practices

[#1]

Overview

A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are at the very heart of scrum and agile methodologies, and getting sprints right will help your agile team ship better software with fewer headaches.  

“With scrum, a product is built in a series of iterations called sprints that break down big, complex projects into bite-sized pieces,  A sprint is a fixed time period in a continuous development cycle where teams complete work from their product backlog. At the end of the sprint, a team will typically have built and implemented a working product increment. Jira Software makes your backlog the center of your sprint planning meeting, so you can estimate stories, adjust sprint scope, check velocity, and re-prioritize issues in real time.

Step 1: Create a sprint

1. Go to the Backlog of your Scrum project.

2. Click the Create Sprint button at the top of the backlog.

Note that you can create more than one sprint, if you want to plan work several weeks in advance.

Step 2: Fill your sprint with stories from the backlog

Once you've created your sprint, you'll need to fill it with issues. Before you do this, make sure you sit down with your team and discuss what work you'd like to commit to doing. Ensure you add enough work for everyone in the team.

How many issues should we add?

The first time you do this, you might not know how many issues to add. But that's okay - that's something you can figure out over time. To help with this, before you start adding issues to the sprint, have the team estimate their issues. Once the sprint is over, you'll then see how much effort the team was able to devote to the sprint.

Over time, you'll be able to get a feel for the team's capacity for work, which will help you plan future sprints accordingly. Learn more about estimation at our How to do scrum with Jira Software guide. 

To add stories to your sprints: 

1. Navigate to the Backlog.

2. Drag and drop issues from the Backlog onto your sprint.

Note that you can also add an issue to your sprint by editing the issue and updating the Sprint field.

Step 3: Start sprint

Once you've added issues to your sprint and the team is ready to work, you'll need to start the sprint.

Note, you can only start a sprint, if:

• You haven't started one already. If you want to have more than one active sprint at a time, try the Parallel Sprints feature, and

• The sprint is at the top of the backlog. If you want to start a planned sprint that is lower down, you'll need to reorder your sprints to move it to the top.

To start a sprint

1. 1. Go to the Backlog of your Scrum project.

   2. Find the sprint that you want to start and click Start Sprint.

 

3. Update the Sprint name and add a Sprint goal if you want to, and select the Start date and End date for the sprint.

How long should our sprints be ?

If you're not sure how long your sprints should be, we recommend 2 weeks - that's long enough to get something accomplished, but not so long that the team isn't getting regular feedback.

Step 4: Monitor your team's progress

During the sprint, you'll probably want to monitor the team's progress. One way of doing this is by viewing the Sprint Report.

What should we be doing during our sprints?

During sprints, teams work together to complete the stories they committed to at the start of the sprint. This typically requires a lot of collaboration, so we recommend doing team standup meetings every day, so you know what everyone in the team is working on.

Step 5: Close the sprint

1. 1. Navigate to the Active sprints of your Scrum board.

   2. If necessary, select the sprint you want to complete from the sprint drop-down.
      Note that if you have multiple sprints in the Active sprints of your board, the 'Complete Sprint' button will not appear until you select one of the sprints.

   3. Click Complete Sprint. All completed issues will move out of Active sprints.

If the sprint has incomplete issues, you'll be asked to move them to one of the following:

• The backlog

• Any future sprint, or

• A new sprint

When should I mark an epic as done ?

Mark your epic as done whenever all work for the epic is complete. To make this easier, we recommend coming up with a clear definition of done for your epic create it. Any stories linked to the epic don't have to be complete to mark an epic as done.

[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings, community!

In my experience, there are no best practices; there are only better or worse ones depending on the context of what helps a team at a point in time.

For those wanting to better understand and apply use of the Scrum Framework, I recommend reading the current version of "The Scrum Guide" from the original sources, then gather with your team, product owner / champion, and scrum master / agile coach to collaborate and agree how to move forward.  Perhaps also review the related references for applying concepts from Lean and Kanban to improve effectiveness of Scrum concepts.  With those, a team will be in a better position to understand how Jira's features can (or cannot) support such teams, and how to mitigate when Jira cannot do something the team needs.

Kind regards,
Bill