Download as PDFHow can you escape the Sprint Mini Waterfall approach?
I work with a lot of Scrum Teams and many are doing mini waterfalls in every Sprint.
Start your next retrospective with this idea –> cut the Sprint in half.
Get the team together and ask them
We cut the sprint in half. We are going from 1-week sprints into two days sprints.
Usually you get a lot of resistance. People say ah that doesn’t work because:
- our build server is too slow or
- we need to document something every time and that takes at least 48 hours or
- our testing team is so slow
- and
- many
- more
- things
- …
Now that’s cool because now you have a problem to fix.
–> Fix that problem 😊
With this mindset “cut the Sprint in half” you find new problems that you can tackle all the time.
How to get from waterfall to 1 week Sprints?
What works well in my experience is the following sequence (perhaps one could also say progression in the team):
1 We focus on 1-piece flow
2 We build in quality from the start
3 We automate a lot of tests
… and can focus us as humans on the exciting manual exploratory tests.
4 We work Test-Driven in TDD
5 We help build the best system
I have explained this in details in this video:
How Testing is Different in an Agile Project
Read the full details here on scrum.org where I expand on the 5 practices that help with Agile Software Development.