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> Our team gets publicly dinged if we "carry over" tickets between sprints

This is not part of scrum



You'd be surprised at how many places this is.

At a place I worked the management decided that a "story" should always be completed within a sprint. So what did we do? We started using stories instead of tasks and epics instead of stories[0]. And voila, now magically stories complete within a sprint!

[0] Just writing that sentence makes my eye twitch


Similarly, in order to fit stories into a sprint and not spillover, there is the constant fixation on making stories "as small as possible". So now people make a story for adding a button, then another story for the click handler of the button, then another story for saving data into DB when button is clicked, then another story for adding the tests, and so on. Then the sheer amount of time talking about how to split that up and adding all those into JIRA...


It kind of is. Well, the public dinging probably isn't. But at a few companies I've seen, teams are tracked on how many tickets span multiple sprints. If it exceeds some threshold, then theoretically it means that either: 1. The team is not breaking down tasks granularly enough, or 2. They're not estimating tasks correctly

Practically, it means nothing of course.


In Scrum:

- the product owner sets the backlog priority

- team estimates

- team commits to what it can deliver from the backlog

- any misses are analyzed for scope mistakes

Rinse/repeat

There’s no shaming part

Edit: format


The scrum guide [1] says team gives a forecast and not a commitment. I have yet to know any other scrum practitioners aware of that update.

Unless a person has no shame, failing a commitment I certainly believe is intrinsically shameful. Some cultures would commit seppuku if you don't deliver on a commitment.

The words, "you failed on your commitments" seems very much like shaming. Thus the move to "forecast" over "commitment"

[1] https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast

*edit (addendum): Invoking 'seppuku' might be a bit sensationalist, my apologies. The southerner in me is coming out - saying someone does not live up to their word is a very big deal.




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