My large multi-year project is moving to Agile and the policy is for agile iterations between 2 and 4 weeks in length. We are debating which is better to start with - 2 week or 4 week iterations. Anyone care to reply with pros and cons for each? Our direct team has little agile experience and we are about evenly split, so I have the task of researching pros and cons of each choice.
I'd take the view that there are some other important considerations before deciding.
If you are using Scrum then ideally your whole time is looking at a full day lost at end/start of sprint in order to do retrospective and planning for next sprint - so 2 week sprints can definitely be problematic unless that 10% 'lost' time is fully understood and accepted up-front.
However if your team needs to be very responsive to changes because of the nature of your business user base, or just the project itself, then locking yourself down for a full month could be an issue leading to you re-planning your sprint part-way.
I do not have any success stories for big project team adopting Scrum from multi-year running waterfall. It's not that the Scrum framework won't work, but rather it's not easy to convince the stakeholders.
Many times it turn out to be just iternation of mini waterfall (termed as Miniscrumfall). Instead, I would suggest gather a few people (3-9 pax) to take on Scrum with a new small project, or a small portion of the large project. Run a few rounds (make mistakes and failure, it's fine really) and get the team to be familiar with Scrum and eventually you will see success. Then use this as a good study case and show it to the stakeholders and manage everyone expectation. Don't do Scum, just because everyone is doing it.
My first experience with any process that was similar to an Agile approach was in a startup ten years ago. We did 3-day-long iterations on a software project with a three person development team. That experience, followed by its antithesis, shaped the rest of my life. And yet, short iterations aren’t always the best way to go.
A short iteration length for a given type of work will depend on the horizon of predictability for that work. In software development, anything five working days or less could be considered short. In daily newspaper publishing, fifteen minutes or less could be considered short. As a rule of thumb, “short” simply means that it is possible to fit two or more iterations in the length of the horizon of predictability.
Hi there,
it is very agile-like to conduct experiments. Why not experiment with a 2 week then a 4 week sprint. As work can often fill the time box you give it, perhaps 2 weeks may be better than 4 in general. If the nature of the work is that stories can be finished in 2 weeks then this would be better as the feedback loop with the stakeholders is quicker.
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