So we started this product cycle with two geographically-dispersed mixed-discipline scrum teams on two week sprints. Specifically, the geographical co-mingling was designed to break up some of the silos that had built up on the team due to the existing functional teams being in different cities. By the third sprint, we’ve now switched back to scrum teams that mimic the original functional and geographic splits and are now on four week cycles. This has made cross-team communication more difficult, but has made everyone a lot happier by keeping the scrum meetings more relevant to everyone on the team. I can definitely see why people like this more, it lets people focus on what they are doing, but I do think we are losing something by not spreading the knowledge of the different parts of the project around the team. Also, not having multiple functional areas represented in the scrum meetings means that some fresh perspectives are lost in any of the technical discussions that come up. Over the next few sprints we’ll try this out and see if this is working. I think this will probably be what we stick with, and we’ll need to address the cross-team communication issues separately.
Switching to four week sprints was mostly to reduce the amount of time spent in the scrum meetings themselves relative to the amount of working time. Between planning poker, retrospectives and sprint planning, a lot of time is lost to the process itself in a two week sprint. For a team used to working on 6 week sprints, fitting stories into 2 week chunks was also difficult. I like the idea of two week sprints, but in practice, it was difficult for a team that is new to scrum. We’ll maybe try 2 week sprints in a future product cycle.
We still haven’t switched to our planned internally created scrum tool which itself makes things difficult. Our backlog is an excel spreadsheet and our tracking is all on Wikis. Hopefully, we’ll be converted over to the tool by the next sprint, which should make life a bit easier on me and the scrum master.