When I joined my new team , I took lead on a new project which was complex in nature, had many unknowns and our team had to work on new framework, techstack, data models. The team was following agile methodology and will start with the work in first sprint. there was no concept of zero sprint or story grooming prior to the start of first sprint.
with the existing approach I envisioned some issues:
1. Because the number of unknown were high, the chances of doing wrong estimations for development were high.
2. There were high chances that the prioritisation is not right and we might have to revisit the features again and again.
3. We might find out about unknowns while we are in the development process and that might cause delays.
To overcome these issues, I suggested some changes in our approach:
1. Increase the planning for one more release cycle and group the features as now, next and later.
2. For the features planned in the now group , prioritise them for the next release and complete the research and PRDs for them one sprint early. That means dev and QA will have 2 weeks extra to go through the stories, find out the dependencies and share the feedback. This helped in identifying if we need POCs for any feature or we can right away start developing them. Or if further modularisation is required.
3. I suggested to track the features related to new project in a different group, because to begin with the pace of the delivery will be slow.
When we begin, we took one complete release only in the RnD and understanding the new framework and doing small POCs to validate our understanding.
From second release, when we as a team were ready with good understanding on the expectations and other tech dependencies we started delivering and we could complete 2 full flows from end to end.
We had very less amount of spillover and could complete almost everything in the backlog, which was a big issue in earlier releases.
