The Question:
On what day of the week should we start our sprint?
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Mr. Agile®’s Answer:
The best-case scenario is we are starting on a Monday and we are ending on a Friday. I’ll tell you why I advocate for that – it’s a clean split. We come in on Monday, we do a little bit of sprint planning, we hit hard all week. Friday afternoon we do sprint review and sprint retrospective. We call it a week, we call it a sprint. We come in on Monday – new week, new sprint.
I’m not a big advocate of sprints that cut across the weekend boundary, because it encourages people to cheat. It encourages people to come in and clean up some things they didn’t get done during the week itself. One of the things I always say to our clients is, “If you plan on working your development team this weekend, just plan on working them every weekend.” Because what you have really done is set a false watermark of what that team is capable of doing. And by the way, nobody is going to ask for less in the future – they will only ask for more.
So, the way that we handle that predictability problem (which is really what it is), is we are going to work 40 hours a week. What we do is what we do. What we don’t do? Well, at least it’s reality and we can extrapolate on that reality. I don’t like to set false premises by overworking our people, because we are just going to burn them out and they are going to be less productive in the future.
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