What is a Sprint?

Sprint is a short time boxed period which a scrum team would work to complete an amount of work that is set. Sprints are the heart of Agile and scrum methodologies.

What is a Scrum sprint?

In Scrum process, a product would be built in a series of iterations known as sprints that would break down complex, big projects into small parts. Sprints would have a consistent duration throughout the development process. Once a sprint is concluded, a new sprint would start immediately.

What happens during a sprint?

• No changes would be made to the cause a risk to the sprint goal.
• Quality goals are not going to be reduced.
• Scope would be clarified, and it would be re-negotiated between the Development team and the product owner.

Every sprint would be considered a project with a one-month time period. Sprints are used to accomplish something. Each sprint would have a goal of what is to be built, a flexible plan and a design which would guide in building it, the product increment, and the work. During a sprint, there is a development team which comprises of cross-functional members who are capable of achieving sprint goals. This would include architects, programmers, analysts, software engineers, system admins, UI designers, etc.

• Before Sprint – Before the sprint begins, there would be a Sprint Plan Meeting. Duration of sprint planning meeting is proportional to the length of the sprint. A one-week sprint must be planned in not more than two hours.A four-week sprint must be planned in not more than 8 hours.This meeting would determine the sprint goals.
• During Sprint – No features would be added, and sprint goals would not get changed. Team would complete a sprint early.
• Daily Standup in sprint – Daily scrum is a quick stand up meeting in which team members would ensure that right things would work on right people at right time. Every day, the project team would gather for a 15 mins stand up meeting would be conducted to discuss the below points -
  1. What did I do yesterday to help achieve the sprint goal?
  2. What will I do today to achieve the sprint goal?
  3. What, if anything is impeding or blocking progress toward the sprint goal?

Sprint workflow and process

The sprint workflow is really planned to help team members to evaluates their work and discuss with each other throughout the entire process. The workflow process is followed for each sprint. The process includes -

• Backlog - A list with set of tasks that should be finished before the product is released. The product owner creates the backlog and provides backlog with prioritized items to the scrum master and scrum team.
• Sprint planning - The team had a discussion about the top priority user stories and decides what can be delivered in the sprint.
• Sprint backlog – This list specifies and defines what the development team can complete during the sprint. This list agreed by the entire team.
• Sprint – Specifies the time frame in which the work should be completed – often 30 days.
• Daily scrum – Organizes and leads by the scrum master. The team discusses what they have completed, what they are working on and any issues that are blocking the work to scrum master.
• Outcome – The sprint outcome is ideally usable product. The product owner can decide if the product is ready for usage or if additional features are required.
• Sprint end - At the end of a sprint, two meetings are conducted -
  • Sprint review – The team showcases their work to the product owner.
  • Sprint retrospective – The team discusses what they can do to improve processes. An important goal is continuous improvement.

Scrum vs. sprint

Scrum is specific framework that is designed to develop complex products under agile methodology. Scrum also used to describe the daily standup meetings that occur during the sprint.

Sprints are time-based periods from one week to one month. During this, the product owner, scrum master and scrum team work together to complete the specific additions to the product. New sprint starts once the current sprint ends.

Scrum productivity tools

Today's market offers a variety of scrum productivity tools. Each one is designed to help product development teams to follow the scrum/sprint methodology effectively and perfectly.

The below list specifies the most popular scrum tools and that includes -

• QuickScrum
• Jira
• nTask
• ScrumDo
• Scrum wise
• Vivify Scrum