Sprint 5 beginning

Greetings all -

Well, next week we’re going to start sprint 5.  We had a couple of weeks between the end of sprint 4 & the start of sprint 5, mainly since we had some distractions like an office move and a whole-team offsite fixing bugs for the main MSBuild product.

One of the troubling phenomena we’ve run into is that people seem to take the word “sprint” too much to heart, and feel like we need to be pushing ourselves to an unreasonable level during a Scrum sprint.  I keep trying to emphasize to people that a sprint is just a period of time and while we try to be focused, the idea is not to work at an unsustainable pace.

While preparing for the start of sprint 5, I noticed that our product backlog is getting out of date.  This is surely a sign that the novelty of Scrum is wearing off!  But this is a good sign too – the novelty is gone but we still like it.

So, today I nagged the Product Owner to either get the Product Backlog in order or else I would ensure it gets done.  Hopefully the former will happen, but if not then we’ll still make do.

That’s all for now…

Chris