As a natural thing, working with Agile coaching, I follow various groups on LinkedIn related to Agile ways of working etc.
There a noumerous discussions on what I would label “Doing Agile”. I purposefully use this term, as it is often related to the mechanics of agile methods, e.g. SCRUM, and put on the edge, a good portion of the people participating in the discussions compete in who can do the purest interpretation of the method in question.
In my perspective these discussion often loose a vital point, namely “Being Agile” instead of “Doing Agile”
The discussion which spurred this post, was about the use of a “Sprint 0”, and if it was a good idea or not. In the discussion it surfaced that Ken Schwaber comments to it,was that it was not a part of scrum.org definition of SCRUM, but many organisations use it anyway.
One could then be inclined to ask the question why?
My simple answer is… Because it works! On this web site I have branded myself as a pragmatic agilist (if such a concept exists), and this is precisely where I think a lot of organisations understand the Agile mindset, and go beyond SCRUM etc.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think SCRUM is a great framework, and it has it origins in best practise, but what about all those organisations that are not up to best practise yet?
In my mind the “Sprint 0” concept has arisen as a consequence of IT trying to help the business organisation become more agile. Many organisations are not blessed with Product Owners who are able to have enough knowledge about business, IT and agile methods to do all prioritization on their own.
In this case the “Sprint 0” makes sense, because the P.O, the development team and perhaps other Subject Matter Experts are able to get together and get a good backlog going for a project / team.
Lets compare it to something more familiar – dinner:
We all know we (mom, dad, maybe children) need to have something to eat every evening, so we need to cook dinner.
If we had the ability and time, we would probably all like to /cook have a gourmet meal every time, but thats often just not the case. Unless you are married to a chef who will actually do this for you every night, and in that case, I hope you are able to follow the analogy anyway.
If you are not a professional chef, my guess is that you try your best every day and depending on how much time and groceries you have available the results varies from a very good dinner to ordering pizza. Not that pizza is bad, its just a quick solution to a pressing problem.
My point is that an Agile team will always try to do better, but they are not perfect from the beginning. And if adding a “Sprint 0” is what facilitates the process, then go right ahead, just because it is not in the SCRUM guide does not make it a bad idea.
I’m very much a fan of experimenting with what works for a team or an organisation, the concept of failing fast is very much on point here. I would rather try something and find out that it does not work, rather than doing nothing to solve a problem, because it is not in the SCRUM guide.
My second point is therefor also that teams and organisations should pay attention to evaluating what works, because what worked last month, may not be needed anymore. We all develop as teams and as individuals, and what we do should reflect this.
In case of the “sprint 0” discussion, it could very well be, that it is needed for some time, and then it becomes obsolete because the people in the organization get a better understanding of how each other work and how agile works.