Grooming sprint
Relatively new to the Agile practices. Previously have worked in hybrid where we had everything happening in sprints.
I am trying to see if it makes sense. We have 3 major releases in a year. For the sprints, should we be laying out sprints schedule only for the actual dev activities or also for story development and story grooming ?
How do you guys put it together on a schedule or develop a time line. Any idea or suggestion is welcome. I would also appreciate if you can share a good read ... book or article.
My advice is to refer to the Scrum Guide:
https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
A Scrum Team does not manage by schedule but for value. How will you determine that value is being delivered each Sprint?
There are no special types of Sprints in Scrum. You might hear of 'design' Sprints, 'hardening' Sprints, Sprint 'Zeros', etc. Yet those are anti-patterns used by many who cling on the to the predictive, plan-driven approaches from waterfall practices. Scrum is iterative and incremental, and all work required for a potentially releasable Increment is completed in each Sprint
Scrum is a framework used for discovery. Every Sprint is a feedback loop for your product and your team's ways of working. Scrum uses an empirical planning approach, whereby plans change based on newly discovered facts. Schedules and timelines are forecasts, which constantly get changed as more information is uncovered.
Check out Dan Vacanti's books. 'When Will It Be Done' is a nice read. You can also look at the blog posts on this site. Probabilistic Forecasting is a good topic to look at. Flow metrics, too.
PS. Grooming isn't a Scrum term we use anymore because it is associated with child abuse. We use the term refinement instead.