Fixing Your Scrum

Superficial Commitments

Let’s say a team has a decent sprint, and after inspecting the increment during the sprint review, the team members gather for the retrospective. They collaborate on a list of ideas that could help them improve the way they work. Then they select two items that they think will help them improve during the next sprint:

1. Update the definition of done to include code reviews before checking code into source control.

2. Restrict coffee talk to outside the team room because it’s distracting to some team members.

The next sprint starts, but the team completely ignores the two improvements they committed to. Despite the Scrum master reminding them about it, they’ve become lost in the work and are too busy to implement the code review ...