Chapter 5. The End? Improving Product and Process One Bite at a Time
The End.
Those two words signify finality, completion, and by their terseness, create an abrupt stop. Every child's storybook ends with these two words; and when we said them aloud with our parents at bedtime—The End—we knew it was time to turn the lights out and go to sleep.
A sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting and ends with the sprint review and retrospective. These meetings are the "bookends" of the sprint time box. At first glance, it appears that the goal is for a Scrum team to get to the end of each sprint having completed "potentially shippable product increment" or "features that work", after which they hold a sprint retrospective to discuss process improvements. This is certainly part of the goal.
The other, and probably more important, purpose of these meetings is to temporarily pause development so that the team and project stakeholders may figure out how to better proceed in the next sprint. Unlike the...
