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Roman Dek
GitHub

Scrumming without a goal

Scrum, Agile

If you have read the scrum manual, you know that Sprints are fixed-length iterations designed to achieve a product goal. Which means, that the whole point of a sprint is to have a singular goal that is defined before the sprint planning.

All too many times I have seen teams and companies using sprints for batching the tasks from the backlog. And then, because the manual and all those expensive certifications demand it, you come up with a vague goal that kinda fits and describes the sprint tasks. That's not how it should be. Please stop doing that.

A sprint is an iteration of the product. Doesn't matter if it is just fixes, new functionality, or a mix of both, the sprint must first have a goal, a desired future state of the product, and then the stories are picked from the backlog to achieve that goal. Not tasks, but stories. Sprints are not batching of tasks. Scrum is not about pretty dashboard numbers. The whole point of Scrum is to work in iterations, so the team knows what they are trying to achieve, what is the next iteration of the product. If you need a factory line way of working, use Kanban.