Recently I came across this site and found the cartoon section nice. It’s good that you put a caption above each cartoon. For this article, i have to google about “mouse wheel” and why rats/mice feel excited to run in a wheel for a long time Then the picture and write up made more sense to me.

I have been involved with S/W development using Scrum for 4 years and have waterfall development experience too. At some point while practising scrum, I had this thought — “So in scrum, we have sprint after sprint. So there will be work after work. No time to relax. But in waterfall I will have relaxed time in the early days of IMPLEMENTATION phase.” Forget about the final days of IMPLEMENTAION phase in waterfall world

The situation still continues. Something is missing here. Always there will be undone tasks in sprint backlog. It goes on and on. I think the focus gets disturbed by new tasks in between. Most importantly we are not celebrating the work done in a sprint !

For us it is a “mouse wheel” forever. Any comments from you on how to stop it ?

My goal of this posting was to differentiate between teams that are on death marches (because they are not pushing back / being transparent) and the Sprint Teams that are effective because they can commit to the work as they see they can handle it.

So. If the team wants to sandbag it and only commit to 50% of what they can really do, will the Product Owner or Project Sponsors really go along with that for a long time? I sincerely doubt it.

If a team is being *told* what they *have* to do during a Sprint, then it is time for the team members, ScrumMaster, and Product Owner to take a step back and really think about what they are doing.

Scrum is set up to be sustainable.

Not a Death March.

No!

So why do you think a software engineer can??