The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year

Chapter 24. Delivering Working Software

“Delivering working software every sprint is impossible!” I hear that refrain on a regular basis, most often from people who have never done Scrum before. I ask them how they know, and the answer is always the same: “We can’t deliver in a year, so we certainly can’t deliver in 30 days!”

At one point, I believed this as well. I encourage teams to use that feeling of impossibility as a motivator for the possible, to use that energy to prove that it can be done. More often than not, teams find that once they adjust their mindset, they can deliver working software every sprint. Let’s look at one team that found a way to work toward a goal of potentially shippable software on a system that did not at first seem ...