Better distribution of merging finished tasks
Have a quick question, I wonder if anyone of you had the experience on the given topic, anyways any ideas will be helpful, so there is the idea in the team to have our sprint start a week after other teams, with a purpose to escape busy merging period on stage by the end of the sprint, taking into consideration that there are two week sprints. I really have no such experience and dont know if this will help the situation so any thoughts about that?
thanks in advance
I am going to assume that the Developers on the team came up with this idea since it would impact them the most. With that assumption, I don't understand why you would be hesitant to believe them. They have proposed an idea that will make it easier for them to deliver the increment of value produced in the Sprint. Why would the Scrum Master or Product Owner have a reason to question it?
The tricky part will be how to deal with that extra week for the transition. I suggest that you plan a single 3 week Sprint and then switch back to your 2 week cycle. In my experience that is easier to do than to plan a 1 week Sprint to get you offset from the other teams.
Can the Developers produce a fully integrated, Done, and immediately usable Increment each Sprint?
If they can't -- and have to "merge" their work with that of other teams first -- will their proposal help to ensure that the above actually happens?
Daniel Wilhite No, No we are not hesitant about the suggestion, we were hesitant about the process how to do it and my suggestion was exactly the one you mentioned (three week sprint and then get back to two week sprint)
Ian Mitchell yea actually thats not an increment per se, its a compliance team mostly with the BE developers so its service not a product, in any case thanks for your comment and I actually really think that we should try at least we will gain some experience :)
My advise would be: add merging to the DoD, do it immediately, organize work to minimize chances of merge problems, and keep all the teams that work on the same product on the same timelines. Having different Sprint start times just make it all so much more difficult.
If you have multiple teams working on the same product, have a look at Nexus (Scaled Professional Scrum) for inspiration.
Or you know, another idea is to switch to trunk based development?