Avoid Overloading Your Sprints - Mike Cohn
Someone asked me the other day, “Is there a maximum size for a sprint backlog item?” The simple answer is yes. A team should not bring any item that is more than half of its average velocity into an iteration.
As an example, if a team’s average velocity is 30, and the team estimates using the Fibonacci series, the maximum size sprint backlog item would be 13.
In general, I’d like items much smaller than that. But half of the average velocity is the max.
To understand why large items create problems, consider a recent experience I had at a hotel. My room was on the 15th floor. That floor also had a handful of meeting rooms, each of which looked as if it held around 20 people.
One afternoon, I left my room and went to the bank of elevators. Unfortunately, this was seconds after the meetings let out, sending hoards of attendees surging out of the meeting rooms. I suddenly found myself waiting for the elevator with perhaps 70 other people.
Those elevators, each with a capacity of around 10 people, were not designed for a sudden need to transport 70 people. They were designed instead to transport individuals or small groups of 2, 3, 4 or 5.
Each sprint is like an elevator. It’s very effective when you load your sprints up with a set of small items. Put something large into a sprint, though, and work can back up just like passengers waiting for an elevator.
But what if the team needs to bring in something bigger in a certain sprint?
My first recommendation is to attempt to split the item into smaller items. (I wrote about 5 simple ways to split stories. Try those first.)
If you can’t split it, go ahead and bring the large item into the sprint but balance its largeness by bringing in some much smaller items. Doing so will smooth the flow of work from one skill to another, such as from programmers to testers.
Keeping things smaller will smooth the flow of work through an iteration, and will help you succeed with agile.
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