My team averages finishing three items per sprint.
Does that sound about right?
I was asked this question in a class, and before I could answer, another participant yelled out, only three item?
My Team does 80. He wasn't bragging, he was just shocked at the discrepancy.
Well, which is better?
Three items or 80 per Sprint?
Hi, I'm Mike Cohn, and I am the author of three best-selling books on Agile and Scrum.
I help teams succeed with Agil.
And success comes a lot easier if you target doing the right number of items in a sprint.
Fortunately, teams aren't restricted to doing only three or 80 items.
Somewhere in the big gap between those will be a better answer.
In this video, i'll give you a very specific number items your team should target.
But let's start with a couple of reasons why doing three product backlog items per sprint is too few.
First, if you follow a no partial credit rule for velocity, as I recommend, a team doing so few items will have a highly variable velocity.
If the team narrowly misses finishing one of three items, velocity will be a lot lower.
The impact of missing one-of-three items is a whole lot greater than missing 1 out of 80 items.
And in the next sprint, if the teams gets a little lucky, they may finish their usual three-items and the little bit of work left remaining on that unfinished
item from the prior sprint.
Velocity then in that sprint will then be much higher.
Targeting very few items per sprint tends to make velocity highly variable.
A second problem is that large product backlog items lead to large handoffs between team members.
If a programmer is coding something huge, it may legitimately be a couple of days before that programmer feels ready to hand a preliminary version over
for partial testing.
Contrast that with a team doing 80 much smaller items.
Programmers on that team will be consistently passing things along to be tested, even if they wait until they finish coding each of those very small items
These drawbacks don't mean you should swing to the extreme of doing a huge number of items per sprint instead.
A team doing an excessive number of items in a sprint, like that team that averaged 80, will spend an unnecessary amount of time updating the status of
those items and their backlog tracking software.
Team members will also have to spend extra time coordinating work and managing dependencies on that many items.
Think about how many dependencies could exist among 80 product backlog items.
Contrast that with the number of possible dependencies among only three items, so if three is wrong and 80 is run, what's the right number items to bring
into a sprint?
A while back, I decided I wanted to know an answer to this that wasn't based merely on my opinion, So I surveyed teams I thought were doing well.
I asked them how many items they finished per sprint, how people were on the team, and how long their sprints were.
To avoid the data being skewed by teams that did 80 or 3 items, I looked at median values.
I learned that successful teams were targeting around 2 items per person per Sprint.
I need to be clear that this doesn't mean each team member grabbed two product backlog items and worked on those in isolation so that you have your two
and I have my two.
Now, it just means that the number of items a team delivers in a sprint is a function of team size, which is what we'd expect.
For example, a five-person team would target around 10 items in its sprint, and an eight- person team target 16. An interesting finding was that doing
about two items per person was roughly consistent for all sprint lengths from one to four weeks.
In other words, teams running longer sprints brought in bigger backlog items rather than doing more items.
So how many items should your team target?
First, if you're successfully finishing most work in most sprints, don't change anything.
If not, though, you should consider targeting two to three items per person each sprint.
I'm saying two or three, because I'd rather err on the side of you doing slightly smaller items.
And if aim for three you'll likely still hit the right target range when the team misses an item or two in a sprint How many items per person does your
team complete each sprint and how long are your sprints?
Please share your answers in the comments.
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Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.