Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Sprinting with Scrum Teams through the holidays

I don't know how other Scrum teams handle holidays, while working through 30-day sprints, but I thought I'd quickly mention what we're doing at Decade Software.

christmas_santa_claus_crowd Today, we rarely work overtime, and then only when we are behind sprint-wise. This enables us to work true 30 business-day sprints, thus we schedule the sprint to accommodate only the 30 days when the team is scheduled to work.

When team-members schedule vacations—during the holiday season or otherwise—we simply subtract their out time from the velocity—the number used to estimate available time during our sprint planning and in calculating our sprint burn-down.

If you have questions, feel free to comment or drop me a note. I'd be glad to clarify.

Happy Holidays!



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