Embracing Scrum Chaos How to Track and Tame Sprint Interruptions
Photo by Erik Hansen of “Father and Son” by Louise Bourgeois at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park.
By Erik Hansen The to-do list. It serves as an optimistic guide for one’s day or week, whether hanging on the side of a refrigerator, typed into a smart phone app, or scrawled on a scrap of paper and stuck to some unavoidable spot. My favorite eye-catching place for a sticky note is the back of my smart phone. I know. I’m a Luddite that way. Rarely does a to-do list act like a set of critical instructions we need to complete in lock-step entirety: things get added or deleted on the fly. That’s just the way life goes, like when you use a list to try and navigate past grocery store freezers of ice cream toward misted-bins of salad greens. Often, an unplanned pint of Ben & Jerry’s will be nestled next to a bunch of lettuce come check out time. From a Scrum Master’s perspective, our personal to-do lists share a lot in common with a team’s sprint backlog: both are carefully selected from a master backlog of to-do items. However, there is one major difference between the two: a grocery list is viewed as being inherently flexible while a Scrum’s sprint backlog is not.