Agile Thoughts : Sprint Length

team maturity and work definition are key factors

There are many factors that can/should influence sprint length, such as delivery schedules, resource availability, customer requirements, need for feedback, etc., but two often overlooked and perhaps most important factors are team maturity and how well the requirements/work are defined.

If I were putting together a new team or implementing scrum/agile processes for the first time with an existing team I would lean towards shorter sprints, perhaps on the order of a week or two.  I believe this would allow a team to mature much more quickly as there are more opportunities to exercise the full sprint process and more opportunities to use feedback to more rapidly move toward becoming a high-performing team.

Another key factor affecting sprint length is how well the work to be performed is defined and understood.  This includes both the business and technical aspects.  If the requirements are vague or unclear or if the technologies to be used are new or not widely known by the team then it might be a good idea to shorten the sprints to flush out more detail and get more rapid feedback from the customer on whether the team is on or off course.  Likewise, shorter, more focused sprints might help the team determine whether technology or architecture choices were appropriate and correct as well as helping to minimize risk or wasted effort.

As you can see from the above chart, mature, high-performing teams with poorly defined requirements and new, immature teams with outstanding requirements are in virtually the same place - they both need shorter sprints, for different reasons of course, but shorter sprints none-the-less.

See also:  agile thoughts : backlog preparation

Windows Home Server to the rescue

restoring a PC to new hardware

Several months ago I built a Windows Home Server box partly to back up the family's PCs - one of which is an aging Windows XP machine that I built seven or eight years ago.  As luck would have it the last remaining SCSI hard drive in that old XP box started to fail last week, corrupting the OS and causing the machine to fail to boot.

Since I had this new WHS box I figured I had nothing to lose so I decided to try my first restore.  It was dirt simple and it worked, for a day or two, until the OS was corrupted again.  I ended up swapping out my SCSI controller for a SATA controller, added a new SATA hard drive and performed a restore from WHS onto my new hardware.  It looked like it was going to work just fine - until the first reboot after the restore.  As most of you probably guessed, the backup image did not have the drivers for my new PCI SATA card and thus Windows failed to boot.

I tried numerous things and finally discovered the recipe that would let me successfully restore the backup for my old hardware onto my new hardware:

1.  Restore the PC from WHS onto the new hardware

2.  Boot from the Windows XP CD, pressing F6 at the right time to install the SATA drivers for the new hardware

3.  Choose to install Windows XP (do not enter the XP recovery console)

4.  When prompted, choose to 'Repair' the current installation

Windows will appear to be performing a fresh install (and to some extent it is), but all of your programs and data will be left intact.  If you goof up along the way and accidentally do a full reinstall instead of a repair don't fret, simply go back to step 1 and start over by restoring the PC from WHS again.

5.  Once the repair is complete reboot into the OS and run Windows Update to recover all the patches and updates that were lost by the repair (in my case Windows was set back to SP2 from SP3 since SP2 is the service pack level of my installation CD)

6.  I would advise performing a manual backup to WHS at this point

In hindsight it seems like a pretty simple process, and it is, but it did take some trial and error to figure out.  Needless to say I am very pleased with Windows Home Server and my decision to add a WHS box to my home network.

See my post on 'network tune-up for WHS' to find out how to make the above process much faster and smoother.