There is a magic maximum size for the items an agile team brings into its sprints.
If a team bring an item bigger than this into a sprint, team members will struggle to finish the work of the sprint.
This will create problems with the team's velocity, which will in turn make it harder to plan in the future.
In this video, I'll share this magic max size with you.
Hi, I'm Mike Kona, the author of three bestselling books on Agile and Scrum.
I help teams succeed with Agil.
My recommendation is that a team should not bring into an iteration any item that is more than half of its velocity.
In general, i'd like items much smaller than that, but half the average velocity works as a good upper limit.
As an example, consider a team with a velocity of 30. This team can bring an item up to 15 into its sprint.
Or if they're estimating product backlog items with the Fibonacci sequence, as teams commonly do, a 13-point item would be the largest they would bring
into a sprint 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 to hold around 20 people.
One afternoon, I left my room and went to the bank of elevators.
Unfortunately, this was seconds after all those meeting room's disgorged their attendees.
I 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 transfer individuals or groups of 2, 3, 4, or 5. Your sprints are like that elevator.
It's very effective when you load your sprint up with set of small items.
Put something large into a sprint, though, and work can back up, just like passengers waiting for an elevator!
If you are ever considering bringing something equal to half the team's velocity into the iteration, my first recommendation is to attempt to split the
item into smaller items.
Now, if you can't split it, bring the large item in the sprint, but balance its largeness by bringing in some much smaller item.
Doing so will smooth the flow of work from one skill to another, such as from programmers to testers.
While an item up to half the team's velocity is okay on rare occasions, on those occasions adding a second item that's equivalent to a third or fourth
of velocity would be a red flag.
Danger.
Keeping things smaller will smooth the flow of work through the iteration.
What's the biggest size of item you allow into your iterations?
Have large items caused you any problems?
Please share your experience in the comments.
I read every comment, and I may make a new video about some of the problems you mentioned.
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Thank you for watching, I'll see you next time.