Fixing Your Scrum

Everyone for Themselves

Todd worked with a Scrum team where, at the end of sprint planning, development team members would choose and self-assign which product backlog items they were accountable for accomplishing during a sprint. The team members would then go back to their desks and each person would focus just on their PBIs, and had little interaction with other team members.

The team’s daily scrum conversations centered around individual developers updating other development team members on what progress they’d made on their PBIs, while other team members barely listened while awaiting their turns. Many sprints passed without the team completing their sprint goal. On the team’s Scrum board, almost everything sat in the in-progress category ...