Pain is temporary, failure lasts forever

Lean, agile living for the running mother of Peter

2007-08-31

The sprint objective....

So, I talked to my dear and beloved scrum master about the need for a sprint objective. And he came back with:
'Increase the visibility of the connections between entities in the system'
-You said what? I asked. How is that supposed to help us with anything?

The sprint objective must be concrete. I want an objective that a developer on a daily basis can relate to. Did my work today bring me any closer to the objective? And when choosing between two tasks be able to think which one brings the team nearer to the objective of the goal.

If you compare with rugby, it is not enough to have a sprint objective which says: 'Well, we should move in the right direction.' All the guys probably have their own view on what is the right direction. And avoiding that fuzziness must be a part of an agile development vision.

So, back to the product owner. I asked the product owner about the sprint objective.
- So, the objective is increase visibility of relationship between the entities in the system.
- Yes... (He always get weary when I barge in asking questions like that.)
- So, does that mean that we from the search result should be able to search for related items or does that mean that you should see related items on the forms?
- Öh. Dunno. Both, I guess?
- But, which has the highest priority? Should we focus on both solutions or one?

Let's say I came out from the room with a concrete sprint objective. And this made it clear that we'd missed a lot of stuff on the backlog. And there were also a lot of stuff we thought high priority but wasn't. Sprint objectives are about doing the right thing.

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