Of Goals, Backlogs and Sprints
As an experienced developer/coach, once in a while you get asked a truly fantastic question by a client who has actually done her homework, and you're absolutely stumped by it. I love it when this happens since it is a fantastic opportunity to not only learn, but also to teach the client how to solve similar questions themselves next time. This particular team had been attempting to implement Scrum for some time, with a degree of success. But one thing was bugging them in particular. How to control stories in-sprint. The advice they had been given (and the way I understand Scrum to work) was that sprints are immutable. During the plannig game, the team sets the sprint backlog, populating it with the subset of backlog stories that the team believe they can fit into the timebox. That's it - only a major event causes that to change, in which case the sprint is terminated, replanned and restarted. So when the Scrum Master asked about the 2016 edition of the Scrum Guide