I Don’t Believe in Sprints — written by → Robin Rendle

I love that Robin went ahead and said what so many of us think anyway.

Sprints and backlogs and pointing tickets—the nigh-on universal method for making software today—is stupid. All this junk around the work makes software slower and more difficult to build. It’s form-filling monkey work and the only way we can improve the quality of software is to throw all those best practices away.

Good teams don’t need sprints to get good work done. They don’t need to point tickets or file receipts away once something is complete. This always leads to an endless backlog of crap anyway which is also a waste of time since they too only serve managers who are scared to say “ah yes, we have listened to this complaint and we believe it’s not important.” That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better. The next most important thing, the thing right around the corner, is all that matters. And that stuff you’ll remember if you’re paying close attention. Discard everything else. Focus!