Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

During the next retrospective, Kurt asked the team to imagine that, instead of being at this retrospective, they were just about to start the sprint review meeting of the upcoming sprint—to imagine that they were in the future and looking back on the really successful sprint they had just finished. Once everyone indicated that they had a mental image of this situation, he asked them to describe the moral of the sprint: a maxim that explained why they were a healthier, more productive, better team than they were a sprint ago. To help them get started Kurt gave a couple of examples: “Don’t talk to strangers” might reflect that we stopped getting distracted from our sprint goal. “Look both ways before you cross” might reflect that we finally solved our quality issues by instigating tighter peer review and QA controls within the team. Once everyone had a moment to think, they were asked to complete the sentence “and the moral of the sprint is...” on an index card and hand it in. When all the cards were complete, the team clustered the cards and identified a common theme, which was around the truth that having one completed story was more valuable than two partially completed stories. The moral? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.