And today, the new sprint was off

Today, we started the new sprint. It's a short sprint due to Christmas, and to visualize exactly how short the sprint is, I draw a calender on the whiteboard. Then they realized.

This sprint start was very concrete and for the first time I felt we had a good flow through the sprint start. We started with a rather lengthy retrospect, really taking the time to print down all the ups and downs of the sprint. And then we printed down all the suggestions and simply voted on the different suggestions. We decided to start to use our own application for the sprint backlog and that everyone is responsible for updating the sprint backlog before the daily scrum. We'll move back to the whiteboard for the daily scrums instead of hanging around the computer and updating the backlog at the same time. Focus!

We also decided to try estimates again. But updating the estimates better every day. And I've already made clear to the guys what has high priority and what haven't. We've also better discussed what is dependant on what so the things we can cut is planned in the latter part of the sprint: we now better know which tasks are suited for the last crucial week.