End of Sprint

So we have finished the sprint for this release. The code freeze was last night and the demo this morning. The client were satisfied and the demo was short and sweet. This sprint hasn't been very heavy going, as there hasn't been any new functionality introduced just enhancements of exisiting functionality.

Two recurring issues in this sprint have been:

1) The client constantly chopping and changing what they want and leaving it to the last minute to request these changes.

2) Dev's digressing from the requirements set out in the story and trying to do 'clever' things.

Although 1) might seem like the changes are minor, the issues are more around the bigger picture and the impact that it will have on making the change. This includes amending test scripts, deploying to the sprint test environment, re-testing, fixing any bugs that may arise and assessing any impacts on existing fucntionality. Now, at the beginning of a sprint it's easier to be a little flexible, after all we are Agile but there's a huge difference between flexibility and completely bending over backwards and becoming a bunch of yes people. It should never be the latter!

For 2) Although it is nice to have innovation, when you are working for a client who has specified what they want, if you don't meet that then the innovation means nothing. I witnessed the client actually tell a dev so you've done x, y and z, that's great but not what I wanted. I wanted you to make a minor change to a and that's it. Please can you roll back x,y and z to what it was doing previously! Now this reflects badly on the dev and the sprint team. I've noticed in this sprint, the dev getting rather carried away and digressing away from what they were asked to do without assessing and considering the impact to the rest of the team and the functionality just built! This is very risky and should not really be happening, especially on the day before the demo or even after the demo!

We should be having our retrospective at some point at the end of this week or early next week. I will be raising these issues then!