Is Your Sprint Sufficiently Prepared From the Start

Scrum emphasizes speed and results, but insufficient preparation before even starting can end up costing schedule and quality.

To achieve good outcomes in a sprint, work items must be Clear, Small, Estimable, and Actionable. In other words, enough planning detail, technical review, dependency analysis, and dry-run rehearsal must precede development so that the team can start running the moment development begins.

Forcing forward with insufficiently prepared user stories leads to repeated back-and-forth for decision-making, consuming the short sprint time. This results in delayed work and rework, and hastily produced outputs may diverge from the expected user value or fail to reach a potentially shippable level.

Furthermore, short-term fixes that haven't been sufficiently considered ultimately lead to technical debt. This is why Scrum holds that this preparation process must be continuously refined through Backlog Refinement.

Depending on the situation, mechanisms such as Sprint 0, Spike (POC, Research), and Definition of Ready can also be utilized. What matters is not relying on hitting a home run every sprint, but rather increasing the likelihood of success from the very starting point.