This one is intentionally going to be somewhat vague. I’m starting a new team this week (we’re using Scrum, and I’m going to be the scrum-master), and I was talking about this with various project-manager/scrummies on the multi-team project that I’m presently on. We were discussing lessons learnt, ideas, tips/suggestions etc. about sprint zero.

I’ve been on Agile projects for several years, Scrum for a couple of years now – both as a developer and as a project manager. I’ve been playing a scrum-master role for the last year – on a large team that I picked up six months after it had been started. Now, it’s time for a new team.

Sprint zero would include setting up the backlog, getting product owners aligned, getting developers who’ve not necessarily used a lot of real Agile practices before educated about things, figuring things out around the architecture, deciding what to track and how, deciding on length of iterations, and so on and so forth. Basically everything that might come to mind when starting a new project.

I’ve got several ideas put together for what might be a good way to go about this – but what are the top few things that come to your mind when you start a team?