I’ve recently been working with a number of scrum teams, across a few different organisations, and I’ve started to notice a bit of a trend with regards to agile practices dropping by the wayside. Now, this might be a sweeping generalisation, but I’m noticing something of a correlation between Scrum teams who are struggling, and the “disappearance” of Sprint Goals and Backlog Grooming. Even with ScrumMasters around, these 2 practices seem to be the first to bite the bullet, which makes me wonder if their importance is not as well understood as it could be…

Red Shirts

If Scrum “good practices” were an episode of Star Trek, I imagine Stand-Ups would be Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Retrospectives would be Spock, Sprint Planning would be Scotty, and so on until we’ve covered all of the main characters and characteristics. Now let’s imagine the crew of the enterprise are assembling a landing party, to investigate a strange new world, home to as-yet unknown and possibly hostile alien life forms. The usual suspects are on the holodeck waiting to be beamed down, along with one new lower-ranking character wearing a red shirt – yes, say hello to the Sprint Goal.

via DZone Agile Zone http://ift.tt/217nKir