My app dev company, Code Hangar, uses Agile. At least I think we do… We’re definitely not waterfall. But it's been a long time since I read anything on the subject...
My co-founder, Ian, and I worked on several different development teams before we started Code Hangar, all of which had their own ways of doing agile (I don't even like to capitalize the A). We built Code Hangar’s agile development process based on those experiences and what we think works best for a team of our size.
We typically work in 2-week sprints. We have found this to be our sweetspot, allowing us to work rapidly AND not totally burn out, which we think is pretty important. 😸
We have done one week sprints before, but only in our 8-Week MVP. After that, we always continue with 2-week sprints. While one week sprints are great for making sure we are completing important milestones regularly, they are not only too intense for our team to sustain for very long, we find that founders also have trouble providing feedback at that rate.
I’ve heard some of my developer friends mention their experience with 1-month or 4-week sprints. I’ve never tried it but it seems like it would be super comfy from a developer perspective (less frequent deadline pressure) but uncomfortable from a founder perspective (less frequent releases). Startups need to react to customer feedback very quickly, so I think we would all lose our minds if we had to wait a month for a new feature or fix to be deployed. I’m also afraid it would introduce more risk because less time would be spent ensuring that the software is still moving in the right direction.
Also we don’t have a dedicated product owner, scrum master, or project manager. We are all developers and designers and we organize ourselves according to best practices, intuition, and project needs.
So at the beginning of each sprint we meet with founders to review what we completed in the previous sprint, and verify our intentions for the next sprint. We review progress against our target roadmap, identify and work to mitigate any risks that might slow us down, or decide that our target was off and adjust our roadmap.
I know there’s more to agile than sprints, and I can talk more about those things if prompted, but here is some more information we published about sprints 🤣 https://codehangar.io/why-sprints-are-key-to-successful-app-development/
