Pages

Friday, October 20, 2006

Increasing the length of iteration for right reasons

We follow 2 week iterations and a good rhythm has been established. Recently one of the team member came and told me to increase the iteration length to 4 weeks. The reason he gave me was, "he is not getting enough time to test thoroughly". This is not the first time that I keep getting such requests, other reasons I have got so far are, "I want to deliver more features to give good visibility", "I am not getting enough time to understand requirements", etc.

One thing we have to understand is, increasing the iteration length will not solve the problems. One would end up in similar situation and problems but of a bigger size. We need to look at the root cause for the issues before increasing Or decreasing the length of iterations.

If a team is not getting enough time to understand requirements means there is inherently bigger issue with planning, estimation Or communication.

2 comments:

Saurabh Banerjee said...

I do think 2 weeks is too short. At Siemens Medical Solutions, USA we practice SCRUM with one month iteration life cycle. Too short an iteration is impractical and will add lot of overhead while too long an iteration will lessen the feedback cycle. At the begining of each iteration we needed 2-3 days for planning and at the end of the Sprint we needed 2 days (one day for wrap up merging branch in clearcase, etc And one for retrospective) for wrap up. So I do think two weeks is too short.

Saurabh Banerjee said...

I do think two weeks is too short. At Siemens Medical Solutions, USA we practice SCRUM with one month iteration life cycle. Too short an iteration is impractical and will add lot of overhead while too long an iteration will lessen the feedback cycle. At the begining of each iteration we needed 2-3 days for planning and at the end of the Sprint we needed 2 days (one day for wrap up merging branch in clearcase, etc And one for retrospective) for wrap up.