97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 33. Agile Is More Than Sprinting

James W. Grenning

Agile transformations often start with good intent but are flawed in the approach. Your development people have been working under the waterfall and a manufacturing mindset for years. Now you want to iterate and do Sprints. They hear the word “Sprint” and think of the Olympics.

You have seen the sprinters after the big race. You don’t expect them to hop up off the ground and start running another sprint, although we expect that with our Agile teams. Developers are told to go to a Daily Scrum or stand-up meeting, which feels like micromanagement. They hear the title Scrum Master and think they are subordinates. They feel they are being rushed. They don’t see the rat race coming to an end. To development, the initial reaction to the two-week cycle is that quality does not matter. All that matters is getting the feature out.

I’ve seen this pattern over and over again. The cause of the pain comes from starting incremental management without investing in incremental engineering and development skills. There are visible problems you will likely see when introducing incremental management without incremental development. You will see that developers do not complete their work in the iteration more often than they do. You will see the bug list grow, shortcuts taken, the code degraded and developer morale going down the tubes. ...