Team

Sprint toolkit

Three small jobs that come up at the start of every sprint: laying out the dates and ceremonies, turning story points into a rough number of hours, and agreeing what done means before the work starts.

Sprint dates

pick a start date

First sprint startsSprint lengthHow many sprintsUp to 12

Choose a start date and the schedule appears here.

Points to hours

enter one past sprint

Enter what your team actually finished in one to three past sprints and how many focus hours went into it. The ratio that comes out is a planning shortcut for this team at this moment, nothing more.

Sprint 1Points doneFocus hourswaiting for both numbers

Sprint 2Points doneFocus hourswaiting for both numbers

Sprint 3Points doneFocus hourswaiting for both numbers

Fill in at least one sprint to get a ratio.

Points measure relative complexity, not time. The conversion above is a team-specific shortcut for sanity checking a plan, and it drifts as the team, the codebase and the definition of a point all change. Recalibrate it every few sprints, and never use it to compare one team against another.

Definition of done

Every item has to be true before a story can be called finished.

Pin this next to the board. A definition of done that nobody can recite is a document, not an agreement.

How to use the sprint toolkit

The three tools here are deliberately separate. The date calculator answers when, the points converter answers roughly how much, and the definition of done answers what counts as finished. Doing them in that order at the start of a cycle takes about ten minutes and removes most of the arguments that otherwise show up in week two.

Set the first sprint start and the cadence. Ceremonies land on the first and last working day of each sprint, with refinement near the middle, and they move off weekends and holidays automatically.
Read the working days column before you commit to anything. A two week sprint is ten working days on paper, and a sprint containing Thanksgiving or Independence Day is not.
Download the .ics file and import it into your calendar. Every ceremony becomes an all-day event, so nobody has to remember which Tuesday the review is on.
Enter one to three past sprints in the converter. Use it to sanity check whether a proposed scope fits the hours you actually have, then close it. It is not a productivity measure.
Edit the definition of done with the team present, print it, and put it somewhere visible. Arguing about the list is the point of the exercise.

Why the working day count matters more than the sprint length

Teams plan in sprints but work in days. Two sprints of the same nominal length can differ by twenty percent of capacity once a public holiday and a couple of days of leave land in one of them. Commitments made against the nominal length and delivered against the real one look like a velocity problem and are really a calendar problem.

What points are and are not

A story point is a statement about relative size: this thing is about twice the work of that thing. It deliberately avoids hours so that estimates survive people working at different speeds. Converting points back into hours undoes some of that on purpose, because a plan eventually has to meet a calendar. Keep the conversion inside the team, keep the range rather than the single number, and redo it when the ratio stops matching reality.

Frequently asked questions

Which holidays are counted?

The eleven US federal holidays, on their observed dates. A holiday falling on a Saturday is observed the Friday before, and one falling on a Sunday the Monday after, which is the rule federal offices follow. Company days off, regional holidays and personal leave are not included, so subtract those yourself.

What exactly is in the .ics file?

One all-day event for each ceremony in the table: planning, mid-sprint refinement, and review with retro. Each event carries a unique identifier and a description with the sprint dates and its working day count. Importing the same file twice creates duplicates, since every download generates fresh identifiers.

Should I really convert points into hours?

As a private sanity check, yes. If eight points has meant about sixteen hours for the last three sprints, a plan that assumes eight points fits in four hours is worth questioning. As a target or a comparison between teams, no. The moment a ratio becomes a goal, the points inflate and the number stops meaning anything.

Where is my data kept?

In this browser, under the local storage key cc-sprintkit. The dates, the past sprint figures and the definition of done all live there. Nothing is uploaded, and clearing site data clears it.