Planning the work
All the work the team could do waits in a backlog: one card per task, in priority order. The most valuable card sits on top. The product owner keeps it ordered as needs change.
The team guesses how big each card is in story points: relative sizes, not hours. A 2 is about twice a 1. Scales skip numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8) because big jobs are harder to guess.
A sprint is a short, fixed stretch of work: one month or less, often two weeks. The team pulls the top four cards into To do, as much as it expects to finish. Dark mode waits.
Work flows across the board
This is a Kanban board: each column is a stage, each card one task. When Ana is free she pulls Sign-up into Doing; Ben pulls Log in. Everyone can see who is doing what.
Doing has a work-in-progress (WIP) limit of 2. It is full, so Search must wait. Fewer jobs at once means each finishes sooner: on average, time in progress = WIP ÷ finish rate (Little's Law).
Talking every day
Each day the team meets at the board for 15 minutes: what moved, what is next, what is stuck. Ben says Log in is blocked: he cannot get the email service to work. A red flag goes on his card.
Ben could stay up all night alone. Instead Cy, who set up the email service, pairs with him for an hour and the flag comes off. Asking early keeps work moving at a pace people can keep up.
Finishing for real
Sign-up moves to Review, a teammate approves it, and it reaches Done. Here done means reviewed, tested and documented: the team's definition of done. A slot in Doing opens, so Search is pulled in.
Part of done is the docs: how Sign-up works, why it was built that way, and a runbook, the steps to follow when it breaks. Then nobody depends on the one person who remembers.
Live software needs someone to answer when it breaks. Teams take turns being on call, often a week at a time. At night sign-ups fail; Cy, on call, follows the runbook and fixes it.
Getting better
At the end of the sprint the team holds a retrospective: what went well, what did not, one thing to try. "Flag blockers early" becomes a card at the top of the backlog, and the next sprint begins.
What happens
;; step 1/11 · backlog backlog an ordered list of work (Scrum Guide 2020) 1. Sign-up 2. Log in 3. Search 4. Profile 5. Dark mode top = most valuable · it is re-ordered as we learn
This lesson mixes two popular ways of working. Scrum gives the sprint, the backlog, the daily stand-up and the retrospective; Kanban gives the board with WIP limits. Many teams use a bit of both, and some run Kanban with no sprints at all. Little's Law holds for averages over a long, steady stretch. It does not promise any single card will take exactly that long.