Scrum Anti-Pattern: The Hardening Sprint

Hardening Sprints are one of the most common kinds of Scrum Anti-Patterns.

Teams new to Scrum often focus on getting as many User Stories finished as they can every Sprint. If they have good discipline, they write Unit Tests for their code. Once complete, they ship the feature off to their overburdened testers. In Sprint Review, the feature is accepted by the Product Owner. If defects are found, they’re added to the Product Backlog in a lower priority slot.

While this sounds fine on the surface, trouble may be brewing. If they finish User Stories to the Definition of “Done” but that definition still leaves some things to be dealt with later, eventually it’s going to catch up to them.

After five or six Sprints at this pace, they may elect to pause and have a “special” Sprint, or Hardening Sprint. They use this Sprint to do all of the work that they postponed during the working Sprints. The delayed work often includes tasks such as running a regression test suite, doing performance tests, and fixing defects. Often more defects are found than can be fixed. Once the Hardening Sprint is complete, the Product is released to Production.

Consequences

Hardening Sprints are essentially the Scrum developers’ version of “we’ll fix it in post.” They tend to decrease the readability of the codebase because people have a habit^[3] of delaying any tidy-up work until then. The messier the code is to read, the harder and more time-intensive it is to add new features or test existing ones. Many people call this Technical Debt.^[4] It doesn’t take long before the team needs to add more time into the Hardening Sprint to get the work fully tested.

Hardening Sprints have negative downstream consequences too. By delaying the release of a working product to the customer, we delay when they will pay us. Conventional or Waterfall approaches to product development delay tasks like testing and writing documentation to the end of the development process. When we delay work until a Hardening Sprint, we’re dragging a waterfall approach into an Agile environment.

If you wish to have maintainable software, then you must eliminate the Hardening Sprint. Large-Scale Scrum hints at the problem by calling anything not truly done in the Sprint as “Undone Work.”^[7]

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Cognitive biases that impact your team performance

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” has become the favorite of many of us who are interested in how cognitive biases impact our ability to make decisions, especially under constrained and uncertain conditions [1, 2]. According to Kahneman, cognitive heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow us to simplify our complex thought processes and come to a decision faster and with less mental investment. Cognitive biases are the resulting effects of taking such shortcuts. It may be surprising to learn that cognitive biases are not always bad, but they often lead to poor decision making. Research has shown both laypeople and experts are prone to using them. Why do we use them, you may wonder, when many of us have been trained to carefully process data and information, clearly state and test our assumptions, and consider problems from a holistic perspective?

Some other very important cognitive biases can impact the functioning of a team and the direction of any team meeting and project. Consider the following and how they may determine your team’s direction and focus:

Sunk cost fallacy, where people stay (or become more) committed to a project in which they have invested time/money/effort, without realizing that any previous investment is unrecoverable and should therefore not impact the future commitment;
Champion bias, where team members evaluate a proposed idea based on the prior successes of the person championing the proposal, rather than based on any project-related facts;
Sunflower bias, where lower-ranking team members might be less likely to speak against a dominant idea if a more senior person speaks first (especially one that they might report to);
Shared information bias, where team members spend far more time discussing shared information, rather than sharing information that only they might have access to and that might advance their project further (this is often caused because of a perceived lack of psychological safety in the group);
Groupthink, often referred to as illusion of unanimity, where the team wants more than anything to maintain group unity, so individual opinion is often considered unanimous with the majority view, even when it is not;
Confirmation bias, where individuals and teams focus primarily on information that reinforced their preconceived notions, and fail to adequately account for information that might challenge their preconceived notions.

Read the complete article here.

Facilitators should speak less and should enable the group to speak more

Recently I posted this on LinkedIn about facilitation and several people provided good comments and shared their thoughts.

Check this link

LeSS Scrum Master Key Soft Skills to succeed

As a LeSS Scrum Master, you need to change the organization... and you have no official authority to do so. This is a good thing. It requires you to convince people to change because they believe it is the right thing to do. But influencing change in organizations is far from trivial and frequently, no matter how hard you have tried, it changes in the opposite direction. The question then becomes, how do you survive? Staying alive and sane in organizations requires these attributes:

> Patience and low expectations
Most organizations change slowly. You’d better set your expectations low (not your goal!) and remind yourself that you will be working on this for years. But do celebrate small changes.

> Persistence
Don’t expect your change suggestions to be adopted immediately but do expect to explain them a gazillion times (often to the same people).

> Courage
Nothing will change without courage. Don’t be afraid to speak up to higher management or make proposals that are way out of your comfort zone.

> Sense of humor
You’ve worked for a year to convince people to change something.

They did... and they made it worse. What do you do? Take it seriously and don’t take it seriously. Laugh. It is the only way to survive.

> Openness and humility
You must courageously, persistently, and patiently propose change. Laugh it off when stupid decisions ruin your work. And all of this must be done in an open and humble way as otherwise there is no new learning for you. Maybe you are wrong and they were right?

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