Sprint (Scrum)

By defining and managing sprint work items, your team can capture the goal, the start and end dates, and the retrospective results for each sprint in a project. During a sprint planning meeting, your team determines the sprint goal and the number of product backlog items that team members can accomplish over the upcoming sprint. Your scrum master makes sure that the sprint goal remains constant throughout the sprint. At the end of each sprint, your team discusses what went well and what did not go well during the sprint and then decides what team members can do differently to make the next sprint more effective.

Required Permissions

To view a sprint, you must be a member of the Readers group or your View work items in this node permission must be set to Allow. To modify a sprint, you must be a member of the Contributors group or your Edit work items in this node permission must be set to Allow. For more information, see Managing Permissions.

Defining a Sprint

The work item form for a sprint contains the fields and tabs in the following illustration:

Screenshot showing a new sprint work item.

To define a sprint

  1. In Iteration, specify the iteration path of the sprint.

    For more information, see Create and Modify Areas and Iterations.

  2. On the Details tab, define the start and finish date for the sprint, and provide enough detail as you need to describe the sprint goal.

  3. Leave the Retrospective tab blank until the end of the sprint.

    After the sprint ends, you use this tab to describe the sprint results, discussion, and decisions that you made during the sprint review and sprint retrospective meetings. You can summarize these details in the following format: What worked well? What did not work? What will we do differently next time?

  4. On the History tab, add comments that you want to capture as part of the historical record.

    Every time that a team member updates a work item, its history shows the date of the change, the team member who made the change, and the fields that changed.

  5. On the Attachments tab, attach specifications, images, or other files that provide more details about the sprint.

  6. Click Save Save Work Item.

    After you save the sprint, the identifier appears in the title under the work item toolbar.

See Also

Other Resources

Visual Studio Scrum 1.0