Scrum masters, product owners, and other people from higher echelons of the managers often prioritize increasing the sprint velocity. Does increased sprint velocity necessarily mean greater productivity? No.
Contrary to popular perception, concentrating solely on increasing velocity could lead to negative fallouts for software development teams. The better and more productive option is to concentrate on improving (not increasing) sprint velocity.
What does improving the velocity of your engineering sprint entails?
It includes creating consistency and augmenting the work quality within sprints, which is opposite to only increasing the work velocity. Due to advancing technology, engineering teams can now move forward quickly from one sprint to the next. However, I am of the view that we ought to put in more consideration to the way we plan and execute sprints.
It’s a fact that operating effective and successful sprints can determine whether or not your software engineers can create and deliver high-quality software quickly, and consistently.
Software engineering teams can quickly identify bottlenecks or repeat a successful technology for efficient time management and yield the desired results.
So, the big question is - how to improve the quality of engineering sprints that can help software engineers develop and deliver a great product that not just meets but exceeds everyone’s expectations?
This article is composed with the intention of providing useful information to product managers and software engineering teams on how to improve the sprint velocity and productivity without compromising on the quality of work.
Here we go!
What Are Software Engineering Sprints?
The software engineering sprint is a time-boxed effort i.e. the duration of each sprint is agreed upon and determined in advance. The time length of sprints can be from one week to one month. During this period, a scrum master, a product owner, and scrum team works to complete a specific product addition.
5 Useful Practices To Improve The Sprint Velocity In 2022:
Adding consistency and improving engineering sprints remains one of the main goals of software development teams. The following tips have been found to be effective and can help you and your team easily accomplish this seemingly difficult goal.
1. Ensure fair and even distribution of tasks
A report from Indeed found that 52% of all workers are feeling burned out. You would not want your software engineers to be counted amongst them! Using a good task management software can help product managers and software teams to ensure that the right person is assigned the right job.
The tool allows you to allocate and monitor tasks from a common platform to ensure even distribution of workloads. There is no confusion and misunderstanding among software engineers as every member knows who’s supposed to work on what. This also encourages transparency and job accountability within the team.
You can also set time estimates, track time spent, set the start and due dates, create recurring tasks, and break tasks into smaller, manageable sub-tasks.
2. Schedule daily standups and raise red flags ASAP
A standup is a daily meeting that involves the core members - product owners, scrum master, and developers. The purpose of this daily exercise is to track the progress of individual or group tasks as well as identify small issues in time so as to prevent them from turning into a major roadblock for the project.
PR cycle time, when analyzed closely, provides you with valuable insights about where bottlenecks often happen. Using such back-up data during the course of engineering sprints can also help in identifying potential bottlenecks, which further allows you to avoid conflicts by delegating reviews or setting out extra time for approvals.
3. Use metrics sensibly
Do you use metrics to compare velocities across teams? If yes then you should stop doing it as it can be unfair on your software development team. Comparisons are unreliable because team members rate story point values differently. It’s a fact that it’s not easy to hold varied product owners and a different set of issues to the same standard.
You need to be apprehensive about using the same quality parameters across projects. Product owners and scrum managers should realize that the more data you collect over time, metrics are likely to get more reliable. Similarly, metrics are more useful when used in combination. Therefore, you should utilize sprint velocity taking into consideration other agile metrics to make sure you are working with thorough information.
Your whole team should retrospectively assess and analyze any metrics you use. Do not use metrics to point out faults or to put unnecessary pressure on your software engineering team because this approach is likely to damage team morale and bring down productivity.
4. Streamline your testing
How can you maintain the quality of your software? The answer is simple - streamline your testing. Defining the scope and direction of testing in advance can help you save significant valuable time. However, you should be wary of dedicating too much time and effort into planning as it can bring down enthusiasm, productivity, and momentum. Do not test a feature several times unless you have substantial reasons to do so.
Testers should analyze the changes made to code. This will identify if the test plan is reliable and accurate, or there are changes to be made prior to testing. It will help testers to build communication with developers, which will help the former improve their code understanding.
You should test rarely-used features within limits and within reason. If a feature is seldomly used then there is not much use of dedicating significant testing time to it.
5. Practice cross training
Embrace cross-training to improve your engineering sprints as it can minimize the chances of bottlenecks and cracks occurring due to changes in the team structure. Cross training also enables software engineer team members to efficiently share job responsibilities if any member is absent.
Utilize knowledge transfer sessions to enhance the skills overlap and encourage team communication. Removing some job titles from the workflow can help disintegrate silos of responsibility and foster inter-team collaboration. You can consider organizing training sessions or hiring the services of external consultants to enable your software engineers hone their skills and fill proficiency gaps.
Training sessions and external consultants can boost team morale besides guiding your team members on adapting processes or infrastructures to current abilities.
Conclusion
As a manager of the software engineering team, you should be making constant efforts to improve the quality of engineering sprints. As mentioned earlier, increasing sprints can have a detrimental effect not only on the quality of your products but also on the team’s overall performance.
Five best practices mentioned in this blog post can help you improve your engineering sprints significantly without making things complicated for your and your team. Each
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