Tackling sprints without enough tasks

[maxim (Maxim Beder)]

@antoviaque

Question for the sprint planning managers (@paulo @maxim @jill @ChrisChV @mtyaka @gabor) - do you currently check whether the upcoming sprint’s capacity and workload match? Are you even able to do that at all? The epic planning managers update & plan capacity vs availability via the epic planning spreadsheet, and sprint planning managers check that tasks scheduled for each sprint match budgets via SprintCraft, but I’m not sure that we reconcile this with the available capacity currently?

It would be a great thing if we could do it, but I never understood how.

@antoviaque

Looking at SprintCraft, it doesn’t look very straightforward to tell, for example for Bebop’s upcoming sprint.

The link is wrong, because I accidentally created a copy of the board (you probably saw Bebop listed twice in the sprint craft; we deleted the duplicate quite quickly, so I didn’t think anyone would be affected). The id (at the end of url) should be 26.

@antoviaque

While looking at this, I notice that there are many tasks in the current sprint that aren’t estimated, which should not be possible. If some of the tasks in a sprint are not estimated before it starts, I’m not sure how their owners know whether they are not taking too much or too little work for a given sprint? @artur @demid @kshitij @Cef you seem to have quite a bunch of unestimated tasks - could you comment, and fix this in upcoming sprints?

I remember this used to be a debated topic, i.e. whether we should shift the dates on which we start planning, about a year and half ago. In practice, most of the sprint planning is done on Friday and Monday, including the estimates. I can admit that most of the time I set the estimates for my tickets early on Monday, and spend the rest of the day either looking for more tickets or reassigning them, if I’m overcommitted. I have similar feelings to what Paulo is saying:

@paulo

It’s quite difficult to change this schedule. We aren’t always able to get tickets scheduled early as we depend on clients for that. Having a ticket creation deadline and estimation on the same day might cause not all tickets to be estimated by everyone due to time zones. When I start working many are already close to their EOD.

I believe we try to do our best. Too often we have to play by ear, which requires us to ignore the sprint schedule.

I wonder if there is something we can do to encourage doing it earlier in the sprint, i.e. that most of the planning, ticket assigning and estimation is done on or before Thursday week two, and Friday and Monday are left for adjustments.

Should we temporarily try to shift the deadlines by one day earlier? E.g.

• Wednesday W2 - deadline for creating tickets
• Thursday W2 - estimation session
• Friday W2 - closing the estimation session; on Friday everyone would be expected to estimate the tickets and already have a plan for the sprint
• Monday W3 - final adjustments, i.e. Sprint Planning Manager checks the numbers; people who don’t have enough work can look for tickets; people who are overcommitted reassign tickets

I think, if the effort to give it a try for couple of sprints or even months is <10 hours, we should give it a try as an experiment. We should set a date on which we evaluate the results by comparing them to the current state based on some metrics (I don’t know what metrics, at the very least we could ask cells and people with certain roles some questions, check the stats like hours). If it doesn’t work, we can revert it. I think, we should take advantage of the fact that we are small company, and do small experiments like that more often.