Chapter 9Thinking in Sprints
In 2016, Todd got a call from a product owner who was struggling. His Scrum team was using five-week sprints, with four weeks designated for work and the last week dedicated to retrospectives and planning. You might be thinking this way of doing sprints isn’t actually Scrum, and you’d be right. Per The Scrum Guide, sprints are limited in duration to one calendar month or less, and committing a week to retrospectives and planning is highly unusual.
The product owner in this situation was having a really tough time. She had no transparency into the sprint backlog and couldn’t forecast a release plan or make even basic assumptions about the progress being made on the work. The planning/retrospective week was especially ...
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