About sprints, hamster wheels and ground-dog days

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

One common misconception around Agile delivery cycles and particularly the shorter ones like for instance Scrum’s Sprints is that these types of cycles would make learning difficult for team members. That’s not just a newbie’s misconception, but even senior consultants make similar observations. I recently read a few posts that can be summarised with the following lines:

The relentless sprint-after-sprint creates a factory mill kind of situation. There is no “down time” — no release of pressure. Without Scrum, people would face intense periods of work, big-bang releases followed by modest activity times during which people would stand back and relax, do a post-mortem, reflect, do some relaxed experimenting and learning, and gather then energy for the next push. But with Scrum, the only respite is the weekend, when they have chores and driving kids to sports games, followed immediately by the next sprint. There is no down time. No release of pressure. No agency about organising the work. It is a hamster wheel, a no-exit living nightmare.

These aren’t just claims made by supporters of the Agile-is-dead trend but it seems to be the experience of a larger spectrum of professionals involved in software production.
There are a few things that are true and deserve to be explored. But before doing it, let’s address a fallacy hidden between…