Why do you should protect the scrum sprint

Today I shared my agile development experience with my team. The presentation was about the difference between KanBan and Scrum.

One of import thing I pointed out in the presentation was about "sprint protection".

❓ "Sprint is protected!?" but what should we do as next, if we are going to finish the tickets before time box?

👉 The sprint is generally protected, after the team started the sprint. If we do NOT have special reason, we should not just simply pull the new tickets from backlog, just because Project managers or customers want to have them. In fact, many teams do it in this way.

In my opinion, there are plenty of things to do in the rest of your sprint days instead of adding new Tickets to current sprint.

I wanna give you some examples:

✅ get started with the technical debts

Some technical optimisation might not be very interesting for PO/PM, but it is very important for a maintainable software product. For example, well structured dashboard, monitoring. You should use this opportunity to work on them.

✅ do internal training

The team should grow up together in scrum. Internal coaching for agile development, special knowledge sharing, and pair-programming for special dojo can help the team to improve their skills. The growth in technical skills in a team will bring directly impact on the velocity. The mentoring process will help you in team building and build trust among the developers.

✅ organise small refinement meetings

The team can use the time to organise additional refinement meeting to improve backlog.

✅ R&D

Do research and development in the area, in which we have still less knowledge. Be innovative and try something out. A new testing framework, or new coroutine programming approach, and so on.

❌ Don't change the sprint Goal, if you have NO special reasons to do that. But use the rest of sprint time proactively for the things I mentioned above. Scrum is about the #teamculture, #workflows, and #increments. The increments are not only about the deliverable increments for the customers, but also about the growth within the scrum team.