Succeeding with Agile

Avoid Activity-Specific Sprints

A good ScrumMaster will continually nudge team members toward adopting improved technical practices that help them learn how to overlap their work. If a team doesn’t learn effective ways to do this, team members may settle on a less desirable approach: activity-specific sprints. An activity-specific sprint is as bad a practice as it would be an acronym. In this approach, the team decides to use one sprint for analysis and design, a second sprint for coding, and a third for testing, as shown in Figure 14.1. In this approach, the team is split in thirds with the analysts working one sprint ahead of the programmers and the testers working one sprint behind them.

Figure 14.1 Activity-specific sprints are a bad idea. ...