6th sprint is on and it seems like Agile framework is being followed and we are doing everything we should. Every retrospective we identify that one thing that we are going to improve going forward and planning on improving it in the next sprint. 1st problem we are running into is constant deprioritization of improvement tasks over tasks related to the value bearing stories. The team doesn’t seem to have a problem with it initially as they see delivery of committed story points as a top priority for them during the sprint. The end result is not obvious at first, but few sprints later it becomes more evident: the improvement backlog starts forming and every sprint we have a carry-over of the improvement items.
2nd problem is an increasing focus on tactical improvements that are the obvious obstacles to progress, while Agile values in general and SCRUM framework values in particular are losing focus and this is not obvious to the team. Our sprints look like small Waterfalls with massive acceptance at the end (usually during the last day of a 3-week sprint) and yet at retrospectives the team doesn’t pick this area as worth improving. Our daily stand-ups are all about the status and slew of technical details, and not about the daily planning. There are some good exceptions, and we do have post-stand-up planning meetings occasionally, but the actual stand-ups are not delivering the value to the team as they should in my opinion.
My plan is to hijack the next retrospective session and run it in a completely different manner. I’m going to turn it to a learning session where we will get abstracted from the tactical improvements and will get back to the framework values and will place the improvements we identify at the top of the backlog. One of the reasons we have got to this point is complacency that we all fall victims to at some point in time. That’s the reason to have a dedicated person (beyond the SCRUM master) to frequently inspect the way teams work and identify these complacency smells.
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