Sprint start and stop days - what's best

Firstly, let me state that it is imperative that sprint lengths remain consistent. By all means experiment with 1 week, 2 week or 3 week sprints but once you have figured out your sweet spot, stick to it. This is important to setup a rhythm in the company. However, the question is what days are the best days during the week to start and stop sprints. Until now, I have been a big fan of Monday starts and ending Fridays. It seems to be a natural cadence and the days are logical transition points.

However, this week, there was discussion on the Scrum development forum and a number of folks are in favor of starting on Thursday and ending on Wednesday. Reasons given are as follows:

• There are often holidays on Mondays and Fridays which interrupt the cycle and therefore the rhythm.

• If sprints are a little behind and you end on a Friday, it will force teams to work on the weekends -- generally shunned upon by the Agile community.

• On Fridays, folks generally tend to glide through the demos and retrospectives and as a result there is a drop in productivity.
• Team members work from home on Fridays.

The right answer, let the team decide.

Certainly school for thought. I have to give this a try.

What's been your experience?

Jack

Comments

[Allan Wolinski]

For couple of months now all 3 of our teams moved to 1 week sprints:
-Sprint starts on Monday
-Code freeze on Thursday before noon
-Release and post-mortem on Thursday afternoon
-Planning Friday morning
-Friday afternoon we have something called Jam which is equivalent to Google 20% time when everyone is working on their own projects
-Friday at 4:00pm Demos and beer.

This works for us well however I got Intrigued by Thursday starting time. It is true that stat holidays throw a wrench into our rhythm.

[Craig Emery]

We have 2 week sprints delivering a live web product mostly used in the USA but developed in the UK so we deliver at 10:00 local time so it's quiet in the customer's time zone(s).
We code freeze on Tuesdays but have occasionally been known to delay making SVN tags until Wednesday morning.
We start communicating deliverables on Monday but one thing I'm hoping to improve here (especially now that I'm a Certified ScrumMaster) is the demo / retrospective - which is currently more of an email with screen grabs. :-$

[Bruce Onder]

My current team (one developer and me!) works best with a one-week sprint that starts on Wednesday and ends on Tuesday.

I no longer like Monday starts for the reasons mentioned above.

I like short sprints because it forces you into the right mindset - a sprint is SHORT. Two or three week sprints seem more like marathons that you have to pace yourself for.

Best,

--Bruce

[Jack Milunsky]

Thanks for pitching in Bruce. Appreciate your thoughts on this topic

Jack

[Dmitry]

Hi Jack,

My teams are using 2 weeks sprint, but
first day - we spend on planning session and new backlog stories estimating
9 day - code freeze day. Release candidate preparation and stabilization code change are allowed only.
10 - day - preparing documentation, fix delayed unit tests, preparing to the demo, DEMO at the end of the day.

[Jack Milunsky]

Sounds like you have your process down pat. That's great. Is your first day usually a monday?

[Kiwinut]

We sprint per calender month, with the last few days being a nominal code-freeze/lockdown. The Calender means that the sprints start/stop on different weekdays.
Nightly builds and per-checkin CI/Tests mean we could pretty much adopt any schedule.

[Kiwinut]

We sprint per calender month, with the last few days being a nominal code-freeze/lockdown. The Calender means that the sprints start/stop on different weekdays.
Nightly builds and per-checkin CI/Tests mean we could pretty much adopt any schedule.

[Anirban Pal]

I believe the first reason stated does not get resolved with the Thursday through Wednesday Sprint week(either), as the Monday/Friday holidays tend to upset the rhythm even in this case. The so called rhythmn is in our minds because we tend to see the Monday to Friday as a "synch" with the calendar week. But once my team sets into the motion of the 10 business days long sprint, it does not matter to us whether we start on day X or Y. We just follow the Sprint calendar (Sprint Available days) and it works fine for us.

I have heard however breaking free of this dependency on the "Gregorian calendar discipline" is tough in multi-timezone sprint teams. Well, I have not worked on that model for now, but can percieve the difficulty in Monday-Friday sprint weeks, which is why the gurus recommend Wednesday to be start days.

Nevertheless as with SCRUM, each context and team is different...so "Let the team decide" says it best!

[debbyb]

We have tried lots of different ways but the best is with a one-week sprint that starts on Tuesday and ends on Monday.

We don't like Monday starts either - Monday's are hard enough as it is!