Superficial Commitments

Let’s say a team has a decent sprint, and after inspecting the increment during the sprint review, the team members gather for the retrospective. They collaborate on a list of ideas that could help them improve the way they work. Then they select two items that they think will help them improve during the next sprint:

1. Update the definition of done to include code reviews before checking code into source control.

2. Restrict coffee talk to outside the team room because it’s distracting to some team members.

The next sprint starts, but the team completely ignores the two improvements they committed to. Despite the Scrum master reminding them about it, they’ve become lost in the work and are too busy to implement the code review change. And coffee chatter happens frequently in the team room—in fact, it’s more noticeable than ever.

This pattern continues for several sprints. Eventually code quality goes down and the production bug rate spikes. The team is also experiencing a rise in conflicts. They aren’t improving. In fact, in some ways, they’re moving backward.

It’s important that the Scrum team live by the Scrum values in everything they do. Team members must truly commit to the improvements that the team identifies in the retrospective. Team members must commit to one another on making the improvements. Ignoring these commitments is a clear sign that the team hasn’t embraced a mindset of continuous improvement.

If your team has fallen into this trap of creating superficial commitments but not following through with them, you can use a few techniques to try to fix that. During the next retrospective, begin by asking members how the team did with their previous improvement items. Remember, these improvement experiments are sprint backlog items, so the team should consider them each day during the daily scrum and perhaps even discuss them during the sprint review.

If the team didn’t make progress, then you need to talk about why. Did the team forget to account for the time it would take to complete the improvement item during sprint planning? Perhaps it was unclear how the team would make or measure the progress of the experiment? In any case, the team needs to have an open and respectful discussion to help team members commit to improving during their next sprint.

Joe asks:

How many improvements are reasonable?

An ambitious team might identify many improvements they wish to work on in the next sprint, but committing to an excessive amount might mean that none actually get accomplished. Keep in mind that improvements impact the team’s capacity during the sprint. Taking on more than one or two improvement items may not lead to the business outcomes that the product owner and stakeholders are expecting. Scrum teams should select just a few key improvements that they believe they can implement during the next sprint. Work as a team to determine the right number of improvements for each sprint.