Separate Sprints from Deployments
Published on Dec 10, 2021 by Craig Sturgis
Teams doing some flavor of scrum-ish agile process:
Is your team using "sprint" and "deployment" and / or "release" interchangeably?
Symptom: extending the sprint length because the work didn't get done or there wasn't enough time to test, etc.
I had no idea how common this was until almost every team I've been helping out for the past 4 years was doing this when I first started with them. It makes everything about product development really hard to improve.
ONE WEIRD TRICK™ to nudge things towards a more effective way of working:
Track a sprint as just a fixed length of time, always.
Track your deploys and releases separately from what happens in that time box.
Just one step towards a much better way of working, but until you break those associations, it's really hard to get anywhere.