A few tips about organizing a successful sprint

Find a place

Determine the location based on your target number of sprinters. 

A few things to check:

• Public transportation and parking
• Accessibility
• Internet connectivity
• Equipments (projector, tables, chairs, power strips, ethernet cables)
• Foods & drinks

Promote your sprint

Determine a few subjects or objectives to motivate people and leave an open door to people who already have a subject to work on.

Possible targets can be:

• Modules migration
• Bug fixing
• Review, including functional testing
• Translation

Encourage participant to communicate in advance which subject they are interested in. This will help create momentum and save time at the beginning of the sprint. You may want to set up a collaborative document (Google doc, pad) to collect pre-sprint ideas.

Submit your sprint to OCA events and announce it on social media, mailing lists, etc.

On the D-Day

Prepare:

• Some signs to make sure the room is easy to find
• Some paper CLA
• Some signs for each subject so people will know where to sit
• Some slides to kickstart the sprint
  • summarize targets and topic suggestions collected so far
  • a list of links to OCA processes and tools to help newcomers

• Spend some time explaining the sprint objectives
• Give room to participant to propose new objectives
• Setup a collaborative document with the agreed objectives
  • Grouped by table
  • Indicate complexity and type (functional, technical, test, translation)
  • Ask participant to document progress during the day in the document
• Show pointers to technical resources:
  • The Contribute menu on this web site
  • OCA Guidelines
  • How to Code, Review, Translate, etc
• Present the most experienced participants to the audience, so newcomers know who to ask to get help on the processes and tools.

• Ask experienced participant to reserve some bandwidth to support others, encourage joint work between experienced participants and newcomers
• Highlight significant milestones achieved.

Share the results

At the end, ask sprinters to present their achievements and take pictures of the team to help you write a summary of the sprint results.

The collaborative document you setup during the sprint should be a great starting point to write this summary. 

Do not forget to include links to the actual results produced (pull requests, new modules reviewed and merged, etc).

Finally, if you have identified things that work well or don't work, do not hesitate to send your suggestions to improve this page.