Red Green Refactor

Why do we plan ? Shortly, because we want to avoid unpleasant surprises. How do you feel when you miss your flight, there is no way to reschedule, and flights are fully booked for the next few days. Not good. Avoiding surprises is also the reason planning is so important to every SCRUM project: your client wants to know when she can expect things to get down. Still we do not lie to our clients (if you lie you will burn in hell – I am not joking – thanks to Josef Bacher who made this point to me during Amsterdam Scrum Gathering) by saying that it is possible to plan everything in advance for the whole project. I hope you do not listen to those who say it is possible. They are liars or just do not know it yet. In a Scrum project, instead of the guess work, we inspect and adapt. After every sprint we know how much left to be done. We discover new things, we learn that some things might be harder to do than we initially expected. We are ready to change, more: we embrace the change. The scope for a release is initially set up during the release planning and it is updated whenever we learn something that might change our initial assumptions. We encourage feedback because we deliver working software every sprint. At the very beginning of a sprint, there is a sprint planning. During the sprint planning the team commits to the next most important User Stories to be implemented. The team looks at the user stories and splits the stories into finer-grained tasks. Often the team estimates every task. This is a mistake !!! Read this post if you want to know why.

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