Stop Sprinting, Start Minting
These days, its not uncommon to see teams, who are doing all their Product Backlog Management to Sprint Planning t0 Daily Scrums to Reviews to Retrospectives perfectly fine, as described in the book (or the 2 days Certified Scrum Master course). But somehow along the way, we seemed to have lost the point. We are doing all the process stuff correctly, except that we don’t seem to be”actually” making money (minting).
The problem I see is, teams are doing as they are told, except that post demo, they don’t actually release the software (deploy it into production). Most teams are very happy showing the demos at the end of the sprints. They start thinking that this new process they are following is magical. Until 6 months later, their so-called “Product Owner” comes backs saying I didn’t quite expect “this” this-way and I thought “that” would be “this” and not really “that”. That is when it hits the team that what they were really doing was building inventory and basically doing a compress-waterfall.
Until you actually release your software and see your end-users actually use it in real life, you don’t have the most important feedback. Hence you are not “done” until you really see you users use the feature you just released (and probably you are not even done after that. “Done-Done” was a cute concept, get over it). There is no better means of feedback nor is there a better risk-reduction strategy other than releasing software to production frequently (at least every week).
Remember un-deployed code sitting in your repository is a liability. So is all your fancy product backlogs and grandiose plans.
