#8 – Manager vs. Sprint Backlog

Authors’ comments:

The Scrum guide states that “the Sprint Backlog is the set of Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint, plus a plan for delivering the product Increment and realizing the Sprint Goal”. We also see that it contains bugs, actions to mitigate risks and activities for improving the way the Scrum team works based on the previous Retrospective.

In the manager’s order above, we see several anti-patterns; using organizational hierarchy to tell a team to include an item in the Sprint Backlog, the content of the item (likely) not contributing to neither the team’s Sprint Goal nor Retrospective outcomes, and the motivation for the request being measuring and reporting on the “efficiency” of the team. At least, the manager got the voice of a User Story right…