A message to myself in 2019

Back in 2019, in my former company we were doing quarterly releases. For a period also bi-monthly. We were working with Scrum, more or less, and we had bi-weekly sprints as one does.

The dreaded sprint.

And most of us were "why the hell do we have to do this bi-weekly shit if we're only releasing quarterly", me included. I even called it "laws of physics". If you know you're 100 meters away from the edge of a cliff, you can bloody surely go another 90 without stopping. All the PBIs have to be done by the end of the release - not by the end of the sprint FFS!

We're not gonna gather any kind of customer feedback on sprint end, we're not going to use them to course-correct the release (unless something really went south, which was sometimes the case, but we never used sprints as a lever or tool to course correct), we're not gonna review the backlog with users and stakeholders to determine what the next best thing to build is and if we're on the best possible course. So why bother having them?

My manager surely recalls this ... Hi Pavlo, sorry for being such a royal PITA :)

So here's the message to myself

You dumb fuck, when did you forget that delivery is the best medicine you can give to a sick team?

• Can't finish a story in one sprint? Practice splitting so you can deliver it in chunks!
• Can't integrate the backend and frontend fast enough in one sprint? Then start pairing between backend and frontend on a daily (hell, hourly if you need to!) basis in order to deliver the whole vertical slice in one sprint!
• Specialised roles are the reason you have too long mini waterfalls in the sprint and 2 weeks isn't enough? You guessed it, fix that shit however you can (pairing helps, yes) in order to deliver in 2 weeks!
• You're using your mock data you created to test the feature that breaks when it starts to work with prod data? Deliver to prod-like before the end of sprint!

So, shut up with the laws of physics and use the delivery as a lever to fix your process and your team!

Frequent delivery will most likely surface all the problems your team has. Applies for young and mature teams. You will maybe fall into an existential crisis before you start delivering, but such is life. Roll with the punches.