Chris Alexander
15th May, 2020
I switched departments recently and our sprints now run Tuesday to Monday. Due to time zones it makes sense that planning is at the end of Monday, thus we decided to start the sprints on Tuesday to make everything fall into place more sensibly.
Just a couple of days ago I noticed that this was the first time I have ever started sprints on a day other than Monday. Talking to colleagues, they had seen sprints that started on every day except Friday!
I can see the appeal of not starting on Monday (aside from our current scenario). Nobody wants to deploy stuff on Friday (one of my previous places had a “no-deploy Friday” rule, which was inevitably broken more often than it wasn’t…) so giving yourself a couple of days to recover in the week makes a lot of sense.
Admittedly, there are some aspects of a non-Monday sprint start I am struggling with. As Monday is actually the last day of our sprint, I usually find myself coming back to the office at home after a weekend and struggling to recall exactly where I got to on Friday evening (log book helps a lot here!). But I think that’s just a case of practice and discipline in note-taking more than anything.
What day do your development sprints start on? And how do you cope over weekends and for deployments?