Every day is a ground hog day. It is eight o’clock in the morning. You come into the office, look at the Scrum board of your current project and pick the next task of the user story with the highest priority. You sit fully motivated in front of your computer, open up your favorite IDE and start to implement the task. But wait! Something is wrong! First, you have to fully grasp the code you tend to put the feature into. But there is a lot of code in that area, which needs to be understood, analyzed and put into context with the feature you are implementing. You start drawing a sequence diagram of what is going on in that code but the more you dive into it the more confusing it gets. The motivation decreases, frustration chimes in. Maybe someone in your team can help you understand the code. You call your colleague, who immediately sits down with you trying to help understanding. Minutes later your friend has no clue either and tells you to “just freaking hack it into the code”. Despite feeling a bit dirty you have no other chance than to hack it. The feature has to be completed better yesterday than tomorrow! But you are a hero, aren’t you?! You can do it! The motivation comes back and finally you get the task done and the feature you are working on is ready to be demonstrated during the sprint review.
The sprint review starts, your product owner and your team members are gathered around the demo computer. You are first to show your new feature to the product owner. The feature works and fully impresses your product owner. Now, it’s your team mate’s turn to present the feature he has been working on. He starts presenting, but suddenly… BOOOM… the application crashes. Your colleague almost freaks out because he wanted to receive a pat on the back from the product owner, too. He blames you for killing his feature. The product owner gets angry and suddenly starts complaining about your team making more mistakes than pushing out new features. Your team mate finally says what your team always had in mind: He demands a rewrite of the whole software because you have reached a state where you cannot add any new features without severely damaging old ones. But guess what! Your product owner demands more features nonetheless. And he wants them now!
Do you recognize the situation? Let us analyze what happened here.
