The team to decompose the sprint commitment into manageable tasks defined by the team and establish time estimates for all tasks.
When does it Occur?
After Sprint Planning Part 1 (Sprint Commitment) and before any work begins for the new Sprint. Usually takes 1-2 hours for this team meeting.
Who Participates?
Team members doing the work (aka Scrum team).
What is the Outcome?
Subtasks are created for all Stories in the Sprint and time estimates are entered for all subtasks.
What is the Process?
- Scrum team will pull stories from backlog into new sprint based on team capacity (total story points)
- Scrum team will create “known” subtasks for all stories planned for the new sprint before starting the sprint
- Scrum team will Not assign subtasks to team members during sprint planning
- Scrum team will enter remaining time estimates for all subtasks created in the new sprint before starting the sprint
Subtask Estimates
- Ideal time for subtasks are 4 to 16 hours max
- Defects are not estimated, but scrum team members will track progress on Defects by updating their time spent
- Subtasks and time estimates will only be created for current sprint (not for multiple sprints in the future)
- Subtasks and time estimates will Not be used for overall project status or forecasting and instead will be used solely by scrum teams to enhance team self-organization
Daily Sprint
- Each scrum team member should assign themselves no more than 1 subtask at a time (unless a subtask is blocked)
- Each scrum team member should update their assigned subtask remaining time estimate and time spent fields before the daily sprint standup
- The scrum team can use the sprint burndown chart to monitor sprint progress
Not Tracking
- Time spent on meetings, code reviews, ……
Basic Assumptions
- Software development is knowledge-based work and therefore stochastic instead of deterministic >> we can’t define all the tasks to complete an item because we learn more by doing the work and discover more tasks during development, unlike deterministic work ie construction where all tasks can be defined up front.
- We discover work by doing the work
- There are many different approaches to solving a problem
- In a self-organizing team, we don’t know upfront who will be doing what task
- The time it takes any one person to do a task varies greatly
- We should only load a sprint with 75% capacity to maximize flow because each task has a range and probability of actual time