Zero value.

I’m going to be blunt and honest: today’s post is going to be pretty short. Not that I don’t have new stories to share or ideas to promote, but today is one of those days, where I simply have too many things to do and not enough time to do them all!

So, instead of me writing a big long post, I thought I “cheat” and instead refer to you an interesting article I read just yesterday on the ScrumAlliance. The post is about “what is sprint zero?” About what it tends to be used for in many organisations and what it ideally should be. I found this is actually an interesting gauge to try and figure out how agile our organisation really is – and I think we might still have a way to go before we can claim that we have really and truly switched both our working model and our mindset to agile…

As described in this article, sprint zero is frequently used to plan your release, groom your backlog and put together design ideas – which, when you look closely, very much resembles a mini-waterfall. I have to admit to doing this myself, probably because I am relatively new to scrum and I think I am not quite there yet in being comfortable to just start “sprinting”.

Naturally, it takes a while to trust the process, and perhaps there is value in not trying to do things to soon – however there is still a little nagging voice in my mind that urges me to be careful and check myself so that sprint zero stands for “zero value sprint” and not “zero agile process”.