Scrum Teams Do Not Have To Deliver Features Every Sprint

Perceiving Scrum as a delivery framework will ensure mediocre results.

Originally published in GoRetro

You read it right. Not every Sprint must end in features.

How do you perceive Scrum? Do you see it as delivery or an agile framework?

A flawed understanding traps teams and limits their potential. The faulty perception that Scrum is a delivery framework will ultimately ensure the team won’t go beyond watered-down results.

Photo by Yuriy Yosipiv on Unsplash

Whenever you observe one of the following situations, you’ve got a warning sign shouting at your face:

• Stakeholders expect Scrum teams to deliver features every single Sprint
• Everything is good when velocity is increasing; the moment it decreases, you are troubled
• Handing over activities is the status quo. Somebody outside the team defines what to do and hands over a pre-defined solution to teams
• Product Owners must sign off tasks done by developers
• Software engineers are expected to code. They are measured by the output they create
• Bug-free is the ultimate definition of quality, even though…