Coach’s Corner

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: The development team owns the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog needs to be transparent so the dev team can properly inspect it and, if necessary, adapt their plan for achieving the sprint goal. Such transparency might feel scary to some development teams as they may still be used to the pre-Scrum ways of doing things—which probably didn’t involve as much transparency as Scrum requires. As Scrum masters, we can ease those fears by using transparency to promote changes that will improve the development team’s workflow, and by promising that we’ll work with management to tackle any impediments that are uncovered by the increased transparency. As we just mentioned, an approach that we love is having the dev team use Kanban to manage their sprint backlog.

Kanban is an agile method that provides a way of streamlining how value is delivered in complex projects. The folks at Scrum.org have created a course titled “Professional Scrum with Kanban” and the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams.^[16] Both provide great information for implementing Kanban principles, practices, and metrics with Scrum teams. We suggest you give the guide a read and see if it turns you onto any new ideas.

Now that we’ve examined the sprint backlog, it’s time to move on to the event that happens every day and gives the dev team the opportunity to inspect and adapt the sprint backlog: the daily scrum.