Getting Real - Holidays During a Sprint

Foreign. What you should do with sprints during the holidays Here in the US at the end of November, we celebrate Thanksgiving. Many people take time off and of course globally we often hear about people celebrating Christmas or the holidays in December.

And so what do you do with sprints? Here's how some of the teams I'm.

On have coped with this in the past.

The first way is to just reduce capacity. Don't do anything with your sprint start and end dates, just leave them as is.

If you're a two week sprint, just keep sprinting right through the holidays and reduce capacity based on when people are going to be out of office.

Clearly you're going to deliver less work in those sprints.

Of course there's trade offs here because sometimes those sprint events like the Sprint Retro and the Sprint Review occur when, well, people are out of office. So the question is you just have them and have fewer people there. That certainly is a way.

The other option is to temporarily extend the sprint. So go from a two week to.

A four week sprint, say, and that may go through the timeframe of the holidays. Here again there are trade offs. You've reduced the number of times to review in retro for one thing, but importantly you've also reduced the number of opportunities for feedback. So in that scenario, perhaps introduce an.

Alternative method for feedback, maybe an asynchronous.

Review where we might record the review and make it available for people to see later, or provide opportunities to do asynchronous retrospective. Maybe don't skip them, just find another way to do it.

So a couple of options.

Again, you just leave the sprint length.

The same and reduce capacity and sort.

Of roll with it, or extend that sprint out, double the sprint during that time frame. There's trade offs to both of these solutions. So you may try it one year and try it a different way the next year and that's perfectly reasonable.