I have been part of countless Scrum Teams. And although no two teams do everything the same way, one bad habit I have seen many teams adopt is the notion that it’s okay to skip some Scrum events. How do they justify skipping important activities? Let’s see…
Possible Justifications for Skipping Scrum Events
Holidays
One easy reason to decide to skip a Scrum event is the holidays. When a holiday falls smack on an important day in a Sprint, it can be very difficult to re-schedule the event. Not only that, but people tend to take extra time off surrounding holidays, so it’s highly unlikely that all the necessary participants will be present to attend. Based on timing, I’ve even experienced entirely skipped Sprints (usually between Christmas and New Year) because almost everyone is off. While not normally advisable, holidays are a somewhat legitimate reason to occasionally skip Scrum Events.
Stakeholder Unavailability
Sometimes, your stakeholders have other things going on, and they just can’t make it. Perhaps they’re all attending a conference or training, or it’s summer and a bunch of people have taken vacation time off. When there’s no one there to show up at your Sprint Review, it’s a waste of time for everyone else. As an agile coach, in this type of situation, I suggest that teams go ahead with the Sprint Review at the normally scheduled date/time but record it so stakeholders can view it at their leisure and provide feedback when they’re back.
Nothing of Value to Show at the Sprint Review
If your team decides to take on a bunch of technical stories or research spikes, you might not have anything of tangible value to show stakeholders. No one wants to show up to an art museum with no art in it. Not having anything valuable to show is a huge problem, especially if it becomes habitual. If you don’t have anything to share, have the meeting anyway, and be honest and transparent with your stakeholders about why. They might not like it, but they usually tend to be understanding (especially if it’s very rare).
Your Team is Truly High performing
That unicorn – the high-performing team – does happen from time to time. When it does, the team has usually gone through hell and back together, and they are now a well-oiled machine. If you’re in this enviable position, you might be tempted to skip events such as the Sprint Retrospective. You might be staring at each other saying “We don’t have anything to improve upon.” In this case, I would challenge the team to try a different type of Retrospective activity – one that will take another perspective so the team can still gain insights on potential changes they could make.
Activities become Rote and Boring
Following on the last item, some of the Scrum events can get repetitive – feeling rote and boring. No one enjoys being in long meetings that seem like a waste of time (even if they’re not). Of the Scrum events, the most likely meeting to be skipped is the Sprint Retrospective; this is especially true if the activity is always done using the same format (such as “What went well? What didn’t go well? What can we improve?). If I were on a team like this (and I have been), I would also want to skip it. The remedy is to mix it up – choose different types of games and methods to inspect and adapt. Make it FUN!
Firefighting
Things always come up – it’s inevitable. But this shouldn’t be something that happens every day. Production support issues tend to stop whole Scrum Teams in their tracks, as they should. However, if you have to skip a Scrum event for this reason, it should be rescheduled as soon as possible after the problem is resolved. If this seems to happen frequently, for most Scrum meetings, you probably have a bigger problem on your hands (and should probably get to the root cause of it so you can prevent it from happening).
The Work can be done Asynchronously
Sometimes, people just don’t want to get together to meet. Call it meeting fatigue, or whatever else, but I can relate to the feeling. I like to have at least one day per work week where I can be “head down” without any interruptions to kick me out of my state of flow. Meetings do exactly that. Some Scrum Teams I have been a part of decided to do their Friday Daily Scrum as a post on a Slack or Teams channel rather than as a meeting. While this is understandable, it’s still not preferable, as there’s no two-way communication, only one-way.
They Feel Redundant
I am guilty of this sin of skipping Scrum events. Part of it has to do with timing. When a Sprint has ended, and the next one begins, I don’t find any point in holding the Daily Scrum. We capped off the last iteration with our Sprint Review and conducted our Retrospective. Then, we move right into planning for the next Sprint. It makes no sense to me to have a Daily Scrum when everyone knows what they did and what the plan is for the next iteration. (I’d love to hear any thoughts from other practitioners about this justification.)
Offshore Team Members’ Schedules
Finally, when your Scrum Team is comprised of team members in different time zones across the world, it’s often impossible to get schedules to align. When this happens, your team might need to get creative about how to communicate and collaborate in a way that works for everyone. It might mean recording a session or having someone who can straddle the time zones and act as a go-between for the team. These aren’t great solutions, but when this situation is unavoidable, you must do what you can to get the job done.
Reasons NOT to Skip any Scrum Events
Lack of Consistency
When Scrum events happen inconsistently or erratically, the team loses a sense of predictability and stability. The meetings are meant to provide a regular cadence, with set time boxes so the team can know what to expect during each Sprint. When things are constantly moving, changing, or being skipped, something is going to go wrong – you can’t avoid it. It might be a miscommunication, a missed requirement, crossed wires, or reduced quality – you get the picture.
Team Disconnect
If your team decides, for instance, that they don’t need to meet every day for a Scrum, and instead only hold it a few times a week, you’re instantly setting yourself up for trouble. Each day, your Scrum Team has the opportunity to plan what it will accomplish and raise any impediments that need to be resolved. If this doesn’t happen, you run the chance of having open blockers preventing the team from making progress toward the Sprint Goal. Not only that, but a sense of social isolation and disconnectedness can creep in, making individuals feel less like a cohesive team (and consequently, more likely to quit).
It’s Too Long Between Feedback Loops
Every single Scrum event is another opportunity to apply the empirical principle of inspecting and adapting – you don’t just have to wait for the Sprint Retrospective to make improvements. By skipping events, you essentially delay getting useful feedback that could cause you to make meaningful improvements, either to your team processes or the increment you’re building.
You’re No Longer Practicing Scrum
It says right in The Scrum Guide that if you don’t do all the Scrum events, you’re not practicing Scrum. While this is a framework, not a methodology, you still need to be cautious not to cut out any of the essential elements that comprise Scrum. If you do, you can no longer claim that Scrum is how you’re operating. If you have already started down the slippery path of skipping events, I would suggest having a team “reboot,” re-educating the team, and getting all the basics back in place so you can be successful.
Team Stagnation
If you’re familiar with the Tuckman Model of team formation, you’ll know that teams don’t become high-performing easily. If a team is formed, it might never get out of the storming stage, in which team members lack trust as they try to figure each other out and how best to work together. Team cohesion takes time, and shared experiences. Teams that don’t hold all the Scrum events run the risk of getting stuck in a rut, and never reaching the pinnacle that they could if they worked on it with consistency.
Reduction in Quality of the Increment
The thing that always suffers most when Scrum events are treated as unimportant or optional is quality. I can’t tell you how many times I have been on Scrum Teams that were anything but agile. Each Sprint, the team would wait to share or show anything with either stakeholders or testers, and by the time the iteration ended – guess what? There was nothing ready to show that met the team’s Definition of Done (assuming they had one).
Final Thoughts
Each event in the Scrum framework has a particular audience and purpose. While skipping events might be tempting or in some cases, make sense, it’s still advisable to put in place and keep all the defined events of Scrum, even if it means re-scheduling them. The drawbacks of skipping Scrum events are evident and will show up in the lack of quality in your increments, and diminished trust from your stakeholders. So, just don’t do it!
I would love to hear the experiences or thoughts of other agilists, Scrum Masters, agile coaches, or any other member of a Scrum Team. Please share with me in the comments section below!