What is zero sprint in scrum. What is Zero Sprint in Agile? Everything You Should Know

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What Is Sprint Zero and Spike in Agile? - Design Sprint 

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This is why Sprint 0 conflicts with the core of Scrum. Each Sprint you should try to deliver a working product. It is okay to fail and learn from it. It teaches them it is okay to have a Sprint where you do not deliver anything that works. This opens the door for all kinds of other anti-patterns, like hardening Sprints and abusing Spikes to create a mini-waterfall process in Scrum. The foundation of Scrum is empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and you should make decisions based on what is known.

By doing you will learn more. You may use this learning to do better than you did before. By starting with Sprint 0, you have no product increment to inspect at the end of the Sprint. Therefore, your team will not run into the challenges involved with doing a real Sprint. Sprint 0 results in reduced transparency: you will not encounter the real obstacles involved with doing Scrum.

This leads to worse inspection and less adaptation. You should do hard work and figure out what needs to be done to deliver value from the outset. By doing this you will be and running with Scrum in less time. It will also mean you will discover problems and risks earlier, which you can then tackle sooner. Your team should have the courage to work on hard problems. Your first Sprint will be hard.

You should start your first Sprint by creating an environment where it is safe to fail. You should not start a Sprint 0 to lower the bar by making it impossible to fail. Your team should be committed to the team and the goals of the team.

With Sprint 0 no one expects anything to come out of the Sprint, with less commitment from the team as a result. Everybody expecting the first sprint to be big success will be disappointed most of the time. Creating an environment where you team has the permission to suck is essential. You do not need Sprint 0 to manage these expectations. Setting up logistics is not a story, it's a support task. A just-in-time completion of a support task works fine, even as advance completion may be welcome.

Considering planning, product backlog setup, and design in Sprint Zero is a proxy for "big design up front" BDF. In agile we try to stay away from that. Often, an associated symptom will be a very hierarchical organization, thus preventing the scrum team from being really empowered. Personnel who are most active in Sprint Zero may be different from those most active in other sprints. The Sprint Zero leaders will "guide" the team through sprints but may not feel bound by the time and other constraints that the rest of the team has.

This creates a two-level organization instead of the flat one that scrum promotes. A two-level organization tends to follow a task-assignment and status-reporting culture, instead of a mind-set of ownership and delivering value.

Before we define Sprint Zero, let me say that the long system test phase before the release can actually be an automated regression test. Each sprint can create automated tests for the features it implements and add that to the regression. The need for automated tests is much discussed in scrum and agile literature, so we will skip it here for now.

Sprint Zero should be used to create the basic skeleton and plumbing for the project so that future sprints can truly add incremental value in an efficient way. It may involve some research spikes. Minimal design up front is done in Sprint Zero so that emergent design is possible in future sprints.

This includes putting together a flexible enough framework so that refactoring is easy. For minimal design up front, the team picks up a very few critical stories and develops them to completion. Remember also that the product backlog is a living document. Stories are added, modified, and split into small ones all the time. X Login. Email address.

Not Registered? If you don't already have a Scrum. Register Here. Back to Blog Listing Prev Next. January 14, Sprint 0 A Sprint 0 is the name often given to a short effort to create a vision and a rough product backlog which allows creating an estimation of a product release.

Hardening Sprint A Hardening Sprint is to me the most worrying interpretation of what a Sprint could be. View the discussion thread.