RE: Sprint lengths around holidays?

We typically leave the sprint timeframe as is, but reduce velocity to account for the amount of time people will be out of office. In some cases it may be a drastically reduced velocity, but it keeps some momentum for the team members who are still in the office during the sprint period.

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 4:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] Sprint lengths around holidays?



I think you have to make a judgment call whether enough team members will be present on enough days to get anything done. If the answer is yes, I would say treat it like any other sprint, and be mindful of the fact that the velocity will be an outlier (usually). If the answer is no, I would just postpone the start of the sprint until everyone is back and work on housekeeping like Wouter suggested. That is a matter of personal preference. I don't like to extend sprints, but there's no reason you couldn't (it should not be a regular occurrence, obviously.)

On Monday, October 19, 2015, Christofer Jennings [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


Do you change sprint lengths around the Holidays?

I don’t mean any old holiday through the year. For that I assume you don’t (I don’t). But what about around the end of the year when many people are off for periods of days, and those days kind of overlap but not necessarily? For example, I have a team that wants to add a few calendar days to a couple of sprints so they have enough people around for things to get things done. Some ceremony days would naturally fall on days when basically no one’s around.

What do you think?
-boz


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