Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

Kurt was keen to finish the sprint off well so was preparing to facilitate the team’s first sprint retrospective. At the morning’s daily scrum he mentioned that he was going to be spending some time today planning tomorrow’s retrospective. He was surprised to hear a few grumbles from the rest of the team. His teammate Dan even mentioned that he might be too busy to make it to the retrospective tomorrow, which disappointed Kurt. After the daily scrum, Kurt had a quick word with Dan and asked him about his plans for the next day. “Well to be honest,” Dan said. “I’m not that keen on going anyway. I’ve never enjoyed those types of meetings.” “What do you mean?” Kurt asked. “This is the first one.” “Yeah, but it’s just the same old thing by another name, isn’t it?” Dan said. “Just another opportunity for a blame-storming session.” “Well, that’s not how I understand it; and it’s certainly not how I intend to run it either,” replied Kurt. Kurt explained the prime directive to Dan. He told Dan that he was following the premise set forth by Norm Kerth [28]: “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” Kurt then went on to explain that his plan was to lead the team to objectively look back at what happened with the sole purpose of enabling the team to work out how to make the next sprint even more successful...