Tasty Timeboxes

You often find yourself wanting to refer to past sprints or iterations. Maybe you want to communicate to stakeholders when in the past something was released or built, maybe you want to remind the team of a specific situation (“remember how awesome Sprint X was?!?”), or for many other reasons.

People solve this in a variety of ways, the simplest being to number them, some name them after sprint goals and others pick a theme, like gemstones or chemical elements. But I like to take it one step further with a tool I call Tasty Timeboxes!

Tasty Timeboxes work just like a normal naming convention, you start with “A” and iterate through the alphabet. But Tasty Timeboxes take this one step further by using something the whole team likes to eat, baked goods for example. Apple pie, blueberry crumble, cherry cheesecake, devil’s food cake.

At your review meeting, at the end of each Sprint, you not only get to look at the amazing working software you built, and collect valuable feedback, but you get to eat something tasty together with all your stakeholders and teammates! What could be a better moral booster?

The first team I was in who used this we had our customers visit every two weeks for our Sprint Review, you would look at everything and then take a break to eat cake together. So, it also had the added benefit of helping our customer relations, and encouraging informal communication. We even had a tradition for a while of team members baking the things we ate.

Obviously, cakes are not the only option. Cheeses, fruits, ice creams, and candy all work well. The options really are endless. It’s also kind of fun when you get to tricky letters like X,Y,Z.

I theorise you are building a conditioned response to be happy about review meetings, but this is based purely on my own pseudo science, no actual data to back it up.

Tips

• Pick something that the entire team thinks is nice to eat.
• If you want to vote on what it should be, get a simple system in place. Otherwise you may end up in silly arguments costing more than they are worth.
• After a while it can be hard to get volunteers to make the item, and some people feel they are always volunteering while others do not. I prefer to just buy the things now.