From the course: Agile Foundations

Commit to sprints

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Commit to sprints

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- Most agile teams will deliver in a short iteration that's typically called a sprint. The term sprint is from scrum, which is the most popular agile framework. Now, there's nothing in the agile manifesto that says that a team should deliver in sprints. In principle three, the manifesto only suggests that you should deliver work in a shorter timescale. The reason that most agile teams deliver in sprints is that they're a very well structured way to deliver your product predictably and frequently. Sprints, take all of the phases in a waterfall model and compress it down to a much shorter timeframe. This is usually a two week time box. That's why you'll often hear agile teams talk about their two week sprint. You'll see a little bit more about scrum later on. For now, let's just think about some of the scrum events. These are the different things that happen over the course of your sprint. On the very first day of your sprint, you'll have a sprint planning meeting. This is the time when your team will plan out all the work you want to finish over the next few weeks. This shouldn't be more than a two hour meeting. The key thing to keep in mind is that this is where you do all of your planning. Remember that agile teams don't eliminate planning, they just focus on short-term planning. Every morning, the scrum team should stand up for its daily scrum. This is a 15 minute meeting where the team coordinates their work. This is primarily a meeting between the different developers about the progress they're making on the product. At the end of the sprint the team will have a sprint review. This is a two hour product review so that the customer can offer any feedback on the work that was done during the sprint. Usually the last hour and a half of the sprint is dedicated to a team retrospective. This is when the team reflects on how they can work better together. Now, as you can see, there's a lot of stuff happening in this short sprint. You cover a lot of the same waterfall phases that you have in a long-term project. You'll plan in sprint planning, then analyze during daily scrums. You'll deploy in your sprint review, and then you leave some time for process improvement. It's certainly possible to be an agile team and not work in sprints, but sprints have become very popular because they have a great structure for delivering a product in a much shorter timeframe. One thing you want to keep in mind is that even though you're doing a lot of the same work as a waterfall project, you're not delivering the work in phases. You might plan at the beginning and deliver at the end, but most of the work in between is mixed together. The team should be analyzing, developing, and testing all at the same time.

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