Inception - How Long?

Abhijeet Ghadling?- You have brought in valid points and its food for thought.? In my opinion, it depends on the project and how old the Team is.? Sprint zero can be useful if the team is new.? In this case, access to server or some tool would be required prior to start of the Sprints.? Else, I do not see any value out such Sprint.? However, it should be for a short period of a week to identify and prep for forthcoming Sprints e.g creating and grooming backlog for the Sprint 1 & 2.

This is classic case of doing fake agile ! If the focus is on velocity at the start of agile journey then the company has failed in its adoption of agile even before it started. Its sad but true. When you start agile journey using scrum, first few sprints are learning cycles, its evolutionary in nature. You should bear in mind that you will fail but that should be taken as learning experience than anything else. Fail fast to learn fast is the basic philosophy on which the success would depend. Starting with Sprint zero is the first sign that leadership simply has a long way to go.

Abhijeet Ghadling, your points on evolving, fail fast, fail small, early feedback - they do make sense. When I read these statements - "stakeholders feel better to have safe Inception", "for successfully start Sprinting" and "achieve good velocity right from Sprint 1" - they tend to tell me that the stakeholders are not psychologically safe themselves, they do have need to showcase success (as opposed to being success or being okay to trying, failing and learning), they do have a need to prove velocity instead focusing on value (may be that they are measured on velocity) - these can be due to multiple reasons. I think its important to recognize this because it helps to understand people making decisions. This could very well be part of org culture. To me, it looks like classic situations when leadership has not quite adopted agile but they want teams to adopt agile.