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Usage Poll: Do you work in iterations/sprints that aren't whole numbers of weeks?


David Murray (11612) | asked Aug 13 '13, 4:42 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
edited Aug 13 '13, 4:46 p.m.
 The Jazz Foundation team is evaluating an enhancement that would assist users in the creation of timelines and iterations for a project area. A significant enhancement would be to calculate the start and end date of each iteration based on its duration.

The most common case would seem to be that iterations/sprints are measured in weeks, (either 7-day weeks or weeks where some days are excluded, eg. Monday through Friday).

An alternate approach would be to measure them in days, eg. one 3-day sprint would be conducted on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and the next sprint would span Thursday, Friday, and the following Monday.

We're trying to get a sense of how common schedules like the latter might be. Does your organization plan iterations that are not a whole number of weeks long?

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Guido Schneider (3.4k1486115) | answered Aug 14 '13, 3:58 a.m.

Hello Dave,

we have several different approaches in our Division. The division spans about 1500 RTC user, in about 50 RTC Project areas.

- Most used approach: 4 weeks, but startday must not be Monday. Very often it is Tuesday or Wednesday, so on last Monday or Tuesday in the sprint, the projects are doing the Sprint Demo and Retrospective. Monday is a quite bad day to start an Iteration from our experiance.

- Another approach is: one calendar month, regardless of the days and when they start. This has big advantages because the management rhytm of an organisation is monthly based. So specially in larger projects where you have some sort of a hybrid process, this gives lesser effort in harmonizing e.g. reporting, resource allocation, cost accounting etc..

- Smaller projects with one or just a few teams are using sometime three weeks sprints. Again start is seldom on Monday.

- Very seldom we ahve projects wioth an odd number of days. e.g. 29 days or so. We try to limit to the three approaches above.

- One important thing, end of sprint should be midnight of the last day in RTC. today, when you create an iteration, you get 12:00AM as end hours. But then you miss 8h of the last day in your capacity. For this I wrote an enhancement request, to have 11:59PM as default for end time. But it's still on backlog. 


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Jared Burns commented Aug 20 '13, 8:08 p.m. | edited Aug 20 '13, 10:00 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

Thanks for this feedback, Guido. We're currently designing a wizard to help generate complex iteration structures and your comment made us realize that we had omitted "end time" from the new UI mockups. We're integrating this now and we'll default the value to 11:59pm. ;-)


Guido Schneider commented Aug 23 '13, 4:02 p.m.

Great. Thank you Jared. BTW, I field for this a Enhancement request last year:
https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Jazz%20Foundation#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=195816

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