Agile: 7 Important Factors to Help Choosing Your Sprint Start/End day in the Week

It is not simple to choose a week day to start your sprint, as there are various factors which could affect the Sprint’s work in some or the other way. Simply aligning the sprint events with the calendar week may not work well.

Let us look at the factors you need to consider in deciding the best days for Sprint Start and End:

1)     Team’s Energy: We all know it takes extra energy on the last day of the sprint to close all the items. Generally last minute changes may not get enough time for proper testing before the demo, if the team doesn’t have enough time. We need to consider team’s energy levels as well in deciding the sprint end day so that, they can give good sprint results with less stress.

2)     Team’s Availability: Having complete team for the major Sprint ceremonies is always helpful for better understanding of the sprint work items. One needs to ensure majority of the team is available for Planning and Review meetings for better results. Having major sprint events on Fridays/Mondays may restrict people from enjoying long weekends – that may affect the team sustainability.

3)     Public Holidays: See to it that, your major sprint ceremonies are not continuously disturbed because of Holidays. When you get weekend holidays on Friday/Monday, you may have to revise your major sprint ceremonies if they start/end on those days.

4)     Production Releases: If your sprint cycles are continuously releasing the product, it is critical to make sure the released product doesn’t break and even if it breaks, you have required support to fix it. Hence, deployments on the last day of the week is not a good option. Release the product in such a way that, your team is available to address any issues in production.

5)     Negotiations: Agile teams do negotiate with various roles during Sprint ceremonies. If there is very less time to address a sprint review comments, team has to compromise and carry forward that to next sprint, as they may not have time to address those. Hence it is good to have some buffer time for the team to address any minor review comments after review meeting so that, Sprint items can be closed in the same sprint without carry over.

6)     Sprint Ceremonies Effectiveness: Conducting major sprint ceremonies with peace of mind is crucial for effectiveness. Think about a sprint review meeting or a retro meeting on a Friday evening with stringent timelines – you may not be able to make everyone focus or engage and best out of it. We need to identify a better day to do such activities.

7)     Psychological: Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are generally not that productive because of transition from/to weekend. Having critical sprint events at these times may not guarantee engaged discussions and full participation.

There are benefits and drawbacks of starting your sprint on a particular day of the week but, it is essential to make your sprint schedule most effective and productive. In my observation, starting the sprint on Wednesday and ending it on a Tuesday is more effective, as major sprint events happen in the mid of the week, where energy levels are high.

Having said all these, Agile team has to understand and discuss various factors and come up with the best days to start and end their sprints, which works for them.

Wish you all the best….!