97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 11. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Using Scrum

Simon Reindl

This story comes from my first Scrum team, which was around 2006. We were building a new system that was complex and challenging, involving scanning and processing documents to be managed from a call center.

Many of the team (including me) had moved on from a project that used many Extreme Programming practices. We were looking to use Scrum to improve our delivery.

We eventually started to sprint, working on a three-week cadence. We had an automated environment that we envisioned would generate the installation files and scripts, copy them to the test servers, and install and run tests overnight. This was pretty good going—or so we thought.

All of this was being done using very new technology, and that technology was a cornerstone of the architecture and the product strategy. A few Sprints in, and things were starting to get tough. We had completed a lot of the foundational work, and now we were trying to include a piece that was not integrating properly. The local expert on our technology wasn’t available in the crunch time we still had in the Sprint leading to the Sprint Review.

The Sprint Review arrived, and we hadn’t been able to add and integrate the piece we envisioned. Actually, we didn’t have anything to show. The last build was broken and wouldn’t even install. It left us with nothing tested, ...