Fixing Your Scrum

Skipping It

When faced with outside pressures or critical deadlines, some Scrum teams will cancel the sprint retrospective. Cancelling a retrospective because a team needs the time to work is a symptom of dysfunction. In these situations, a retrospective is exactly what a team needs.

When working in a complex domain where outcomes are more unknown than known, a Scrum team needs to take time to think about how members are working together, and adapt their approach as needed. Outside pressure is a sign that there might be organizational dysfunction that the team isn’t dealing with appropriately. It’s important to inspect where outside pressures are coming from, and create a plan for resolving those issues. A lack of transparency to the world outside ...